


that storm left us shipwrecked

by eneiryu



Series: we know all sorts of things we don't believe [3]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: But Also Maybe Agree That His Plans Could Use Some Work, Everybody Is Very Grateful That Theo Can Stay Calm Under Pressure, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, POV Alec
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-03
Packaged: 2019-09-06 00:01:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16821097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eneiryu/pseuds/eneiryu
Summary: Objectively speaking, watching Theo collapse in the rearview mirror is the worst ten seconds of Alec’s life, and he was nearly murdered that one time.





	that storm left us shipwrecked

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter Three of _i know all sorts of things i don't believe_ from Alec's POV. This was about a third shorter and was missing the first part describing the attack altogether before [greeneyeedcandy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greeneyeedcandy/pseuds/greeneyeedcandy) prompted me for a POV-switch that included that and the Alec-Mason-Nolan escape and return trip. So, to the extent that you are glad that first part is there (and that I had some extra motivation to finish this story) send the good vibes thataway. 
> 
> For those of you who also gave me prompts, you've hooked me; I've got outlines started for all of them. That said, my next fic is likely to be a completely unrelated one, so stay tuned.
> 
> As always, thanks to everyone who reads and comments; I'm a pretty big dork about reading through them, and they always bring a huge smile to my face in these somewhat trying times.

Alec wouldn’t have believed it possible before being bitten by a mad werewolf, nearly getting murdered by a bunch of genocidal maniacs, and then getting rescued by someone who ultimately turned out to be the dorkiest alpha in, potentially, the entire history of alphas, but he can literally hear Theo’s teeth grinding from across the hall.

Neither Alec, Mason, or Nolan had held it against Theo when he’d kicked them out of his apartment, twenty minutes after Scott and the others had left for Visalia. Liam was with Scott, after all—after essentially emotionally blackmailing Scott into letting him go with them—and since Theo and Liam were both still pretending that they weren’t helplessly attracted to each other, Theo had to redirect his worry of something happening to Liam _somewhere_ , and apparently he’d chosen being prickly and paranoid and kind of giant dick. So by the time Mason had accidentally knocked over Theo’s mug of markers and Theo had gotten a look on his face like he was strongly considering duct-taping them all to their seats to stop their fidgeting, Alec had already started ushering Nolan and Mason towards the door, even before Theo had “suggested” that they relocate to Alec’s apartment.

Or Alec had thought it was that simple, anyway. Now—even half-distracted as he is by the way that Nolan’s leg is pressing up against his own even though there’s plenty of room left on the couch—Alec catches a sharp edge to Theo’s scent that he doesn’t like. It stays muted, low, like Theo is maybe shoving whatever is causing it down, trying to ignore it, but if that’s Theo’s coping strategy, it’s not working; not only can Alec hear it when his teeth start grinding, but it’s followed soon after by a coarse, repetitive scratching sound that Alec is ninety percent sure is Theo compulsively scraping the edges of his shifted claws together.

Alec tries to ignore it at first, tells himself it’s just Theo being himself—overprotective, a little cynical, convinced that any plan that doesn’t directly involve his grand strategic brilliance is doomed to failure—but Theo’s anxiety keeps kicking up Alec’s own, and eventually the pressure at the tips of Alec’s nails, his gums, becomes too much. He hasn’t lost control of a shift in weeks, but Nolan is three inches off his left elbow; Alec isn’t willing to risk it.

He makes some half-assed joke to explain his sudden need to go check on Theo to Mason and Nolan as he gets up, can see and smell the nerves that they’re _also_ trying to hide as they watch him go. He leaves them on his couch pretending to watch whatever they’d found on his laptop and pads over to Theo’s, slides the door open and slips through, Theo glancing at him and then his gaze returning like a compass to magnetic north to his giant wall map. Alec pushes past his instinct to hesitate and instead tries to paste on an aura of seeming nonchalance, rolling his eyes at Theo’s brooding silence and hopping up to sit on the table next to him when Theo continues to refuse to acknowledge him.

And while he doesn’t relax, exactly, once Alec is in arm’s reach, the tension in his shoulders unwinds some, so Alec declares a minor victory; he’s still new to werewolves in general and pack dynamics in particular, but the way that proximity nearly always helps soothe the ragged edge of the other pack members’ worst moods has always been instinctual.

Alec gives him a very generous five additional seconds, and then he asks, “You want to tell me what the hell is going on with you? You’re giving off so much nervous energy that _my_ jaw was starting to ache all the way over in my place from keeping my fangs from popping out.”

Theo shoots him a dirty look, “It’s not _nervous energy_.”

Alec thinks Theo is maybe missing the point, but maybe it’s a good sign that his first instinct is to be insulted by Alec’s word choice, “Stoic agitation then, whatever.” He substitutes, then adds, because Theo’s jaw is working but he doesn’t look any closer to confessing what the hell is going on with him, “Look, even Nolan and Mason can tell something’s wrong and they don’t have to suffer through hearing your teeth grinding from across the hall.”

Theo’s nostrils flare and his lips curl into the briefest of snarls, a hint of temper bleeding through his otherwise impeccable control, but it doesn’t last; he jerks his gaze away from Alec and Alec knows—he _knows_ —even before Theo proves him right that it’ll go straight back to the map. Alec feels his admittedly faked good mood start to fade away; whatever this is, it clearly goes well beyond Theo’s poorly hidden infatuation with Liam.

Alec had met Theo long after everything that happened between him and the McCall pack, but the weight of that history—which Alec has been slowly filled-in on, grudgingly and awkwardly, like no one has yet really figured out how to talk about any of it—has always been present. More so for Theo than for the others, Alec had quickly grasped, though Theo doesn’t seem to realize that; he has a way of simultaneously straining towards and away from the rest of the McCall pack that’s a little painful to watch. Alec knows it drives some of the others nuts—Liam and Lydia in particular—but Theo is so effortlessly adept at turning conversations away from topics he doesn’t want to discuss that no one ever manages to talk to him about it; Alec has watched more than one McCall pack member try and fail to do so, and all without recognizing that that’s what’s happened.

And that’s what’s happening _here_ , Alec realizes, watching Theo watch the map. All those instincts—deny, deceive, disrupt, destroy, the things that make Theo the infiltrator and spy that he has always been, and will always _be_ , whatever else he manages to become—they’re the things clenching Theo’s jaw punishingly hard, winching his shoulders painfully tight. And so even before Theo finally speaks, Alec finds himself thinking _something’s going on_ , a slow curl of dread already starting to curdle in his gut.

And yet hearing Theo say it—gritting out _something’s wrong_ between his clenched teeth—is infinitely worse, like confirmation, and Alec finds himself blurting out, even though he’s pretty sure he would have heard it if Theo had taken a call, “Did you hear from Scott and the others, what happened? Are they okay?”

Theo snaps at him and then clearly immediately regrets it, taking in a deep breath and exhaling it out, repeating, _they’re fine_ , like maybe saying it again might make it true. But it really almost seems to have the opposite effect; Theo gets _more_ tense, like he knows he’s lying to himself but doesn’t know _how_. And Alec—whose blunt human nails won’t stop prickling and whose jaw really is starting to ache from holding back his fangs—doesn’t know what the hell else to do, so he just keeps talking.

“Then what’s wrong?” He asks gently, and expects Theo’s snarled _I don’t know_ and his sudden explosive movement up and away from the table, makes sure not to flinch or shy away.

Alec watches him go and then glances at the map, at the multi-colored marks detailing what the McCall pack and their allies know of Monroe and her fanatical little band. Clearly Theo has recognized something, some truth that the rest of them haven’t— _can’t_ —but it’s obvious from the frustration vibrating through every tense muscle of Theo’s frame that he can’t wrap his hands around the full shape of it, that it keeps slipping from his grasp. So Alec bites his lip and slides down off the table, comes to stand just off Theo’s shoulder; proximity and presence.

“So what do you know, Theo?” He says, then darts his hands up between them, palms out to try and signal _I’m on your side_ as Theo shoves off of the window and jerks a hand through his hair, his expression a rictus of frustration, “ _Theo_. Whatever it is, whatever you’re thinking, just because you don’t know everything, doesn’t mean you don’t know anything. So tell me what you do know.”

Theo stops and looks at him, a brief and—though Alec is willing to let it go given the circumstances—a little insultingly surprised look crossing his face. He glances out of the window instead of back at the map, which Alec claims as another small victory, some of the tension in his frame bleeding away as he takes Alec’s offered outlet and lets some of his anxiety transmute into thoughtfulness. It takes him nearly half a minute, Alec forcing down every urge he has to try and prompt Theo—he feels a bit like whatever tension that Theo managed to release just jumped to him instead—and waits.

Finally, Theo says slowly, like the thought is still forming even as he gives voice to it, “The timing is too perfect.”

Alec feels his brow furrow, “The timing...the timing of Lydia’s vision?”

“Prediction,” Theo corrects, but he isn’t even looking at Alec as he speaks, a quick flash of _something_ crossing his face as he says it.

“Prediction,” Alec repeats, caught between the urge to roll his eyes and the quick clench in his chest; was that important, that distinction? “Okay, so the timing of Lydia’s prediction is too perfect. What makes it ‘too perfect?’”

Another slow, syrupy half-minute passes in silence after Alec speaks before Theo suddenly whips around to look at the map, his pensive expression cracking into a dumbfounded, almost dazed look of horror. He stares at the map, his mouth open and his suddenly racing heartbeat thunderously loud in Alec’s ears, his scent flooding with a sour, sharp note that Alec nearly gags on.

Alec’s distracted by that, working his suddenly saliva-flooded mouth to try and wash away the bitter taste, and he almost misses Theo’s pronouncement, Theo stating almost blankly, “Everyone’s gone.”

Alec drags his full attention back to Theo, forcibly ignoring the way that his body wants to respond to the sudden surge of adrenaline-soaked signals that Theo is giving off, “What?”

“Everyone’s _gone_ ,” Theo repeats, gesturing to the map. Alec desperately wishes he understood what Theo is trying to tell him, but he doesn’t, and Theo clearly realizes that; he stalks over to the map and rips down a post-it note, holds it out to Alec demonstratively, “The trial, Alec. Agent McCall, the Sheriff, Parrish—they’re all at the trial in Redding.”

_Oh shit_ , Alec thinks, finally starting to see the outline of the catastrophe barreling towards them, the one that Theo had recognized an hour ago without fully realizing what he was seeing. Alec watches mutely as Theo closes his fist around the note, the crumpling of the paper incongruously loud in the suddenly silent apartment, and then throws it violently into the middle of the room.

“They’re gone, and now so is Scott, and Malia, and Lydia, and Stiles, and Derek. Argent is on his way to Visalia from wherever the hell he’s been. Even Liam and Corey are gone,” Theo continues, almost seeming to explain the situation to himself as much as to Alec.

But Alec doesn’t want to believe it, a part of himself rebelling against the reality that Theo has just laid out even as he can feel the beginnings of panic start to tighten his throat, eat away at his gut, “But they’re gone because of Lydia’s vision. And she only had that a few hours ago, how could Monroe—how could anyone—know that she’d have a vision?”

This time when Theo corrects him it’s deliberate and purposeful and a little bleak, “ _Prediction_. Banshees don’t see the future, they _predict_ it.”

And Alec sees it, sees the exact moment that Theo comes to some decision, slips into some other mode, infiltrator or spy or whatever darker part of himself he usually tries to keep hidden from the rest of the pack; the directionless tension melts from his body and is replaced with a predatory sort of stillness, a terrifying sort of determination steeling his expression. When he looks at Alec a beat later there’s almost nothing of the Theo he knows in his eyes, just a cold focus; Alec has to stop himself from taking an instinctual step back.

“Get Mason and Nolan,” Theo orders him.

But Alec is still too whiplashed from the sudden turn the day has taken, still too shocked and more than a little freaked-out by the replacement of his friend with this steely-eyed _someone_ , and he doesn’t move. And that’s when something happens that has _never_ happened before; Theo’s eyes flare as he glares at Alec and he snarls through suddenly fanged teeth, “ _Right now_ , Alec. _Go_.”

Alec does stumble backwards a few steps then, his own eyes flaring and his claws lengthening as he loses the tight hold he’d had on his shift in surprise and not a little fear; he’s never seen Theo lose control of a shift like that, or use it as a blunt instrument against someone else. The sudden flood of hurt that sweeps over Alec is almost worse than the panic that Theo’s explanation, his demeanor, has evoked, but then Alec catches the ragged edge of Theo’s scent; terror, pure and unbridled. Alec thinks, then, unprompted, of Liam: of overhearing him say to Theo one time when they’d been offhandedly arguing about something wholly unimportant; _what, aren’t you going to tell me that I only get angry when I get afraid again?_

He goes.

\---

Alec stops exactly once in the stairwell, Mason and Nolan hot on his heels, and that’s when he hears three quick _cracks_ of gunfire and, underneath that, Theo’s pained shout and the horrifyingly visceral sound of bullets tearing through flesh. Jerking to a graceless halt, Mason nearly colliding with his back, Alec stares upwards towards the door leading back to his and Theo’s floor and feels his whole expression spasm with distress.

“That was gunfire,” Mason says blankly, also looking up.

Nolan looks between them for a second and then Alec has to lunge for him as Nolan takes off back up the stairs; he tries to grab Nolan’s arm but the angle’s wrong in the cramped stairwell and he misses. Swearing, he shoves past Mason—who had already moved back to try and make himself as small an obstacle as possible—and finally manages to get ahold of Nolan halfway up the next sets of stairs. Adrenaline and terror make him clumsy, though, and he winds up half-tripping, ends up pinning Nolan to the side of the stairwell wall with his body.

Nolan either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care, demanding, “We have to go back, we have to help him.”

Alec is already shaking his head, “We can’t. That’s what they want.”

Alec wasn’t really aware of that truth before it comes spilling out of his mouth, but the second it does, he knows he’s right. It’s what Theo had realized, why he’d forced them into the stairwell and stayed behind to hold off the hunters in the elevator; the hunters meant to use them as bait, both against each other and against Scott. Either Theo would succeed in stopping the hunters upstairs and come join them or he wouldn’t, but either way, the only thing that the three of them going back could possibly accomplish is to render Theo’s sacrifice entirely worthless.

“Mason said that was gunfire, what if they managed to hit him?” Nolan argues, shoving at Alec’s shoulders to try and get him to move back.

Alec plants his feet instinctually to prevent Nolan from pushing him off, but he barely notices, all his attention on a single, blank realization: _they didn’t hear Theo yell_. Mason and Nolan had heard the gunfire but they’re human, with human senses; they didn’t—couldn’t—hear Theo shout or catch the horrible, wet sound the bullets had made as they’d torn through Theo’s flesh. _They managed to hit him_ , Alec answers Nolan’s question silently, bleakly, and he’s still trying to think of something to say, some way to both tell Nolan and Mason the truth and yet still convince them to keep moving, when his ears catch movement below them.

He whips his head around and catches the barest glimpse of harsh fluorescent lighting glinting off the sleek, deadly gloss of a gun barrel two landings down, and he moves before he’s even fully aware of it. The three hunters come to a stop when they see him, now firmly planted on the landing between them and Mason and Nolan. Behind him, Mason gets ahold of Nolan’s arm and yanks him back onto the landing one set of stairs up, as out of range of the hunters as possible in the cramped space. Alec sees the hunters’ hands tighten around their guns as they stare at him and he realizes that his eyes have flared instinctively, his fangs and claws have lengthened.

The first hunter studies Alec for a beat longer and then flicks his gaze up towards where Mason and Nolan have crouched back in the corner of the landing; Alec snarls a warning and the hunter looks back at him. Behind him, the two other hunters start to bring their guns up but the first halts them with a gesture, and then he turns back to Alec.

“Alec—it’s Alec, right?” He starts, tone conversational, like they’d all run into each other out around town, no automatic weapons or genocidal motives involved; Alec curls his lips back to bare his fangs more clearly and doesn’t respond.

The implied threat is enough to set one of the backup hunters off, apparently, and he brings his gun up to point it directly at Alec’s heart; Alec feels his pulse jump but doesn’t move, just steadies his stance and tries to brace himself as best he can. But the first hunter just swears and grabs the barrel of the gun, shoves it forcefully back down with a pointed glower at its owner before refocusing on Alec.

“Look, Alec,” The hunter starts again, tone now soothing, his hands releasing his own gun to let it hang from the strap on his chest, his palms up and out, “There’s no way out. You get that, right? Even if you got past us, there are a dozen more of us downstairs. Not to mention the ones upstairs with your friend.”

Alec twitches at the reminder of Theo upstairs, alone with an unknown number of hunters and definitely wounded, if not already… Alec cuts himself off before he can finish that thought. He sees the hunter’s eyes catch the movement, a smirk briefly curling his lips, before he smooths his expression back out.

“We’re not going to hurt you,” The hunter promises, and Alec’s disbelief must be written all over his face because the hunter grimaces—very convincingly, in fact; if Alec didn’t know better he might buy it—and continues, “Your friend Theo was a special circumstance; we knew he’d never cooperate. But you and Mason and Nolan, we have very strict orders from Monroe not to hurt you. She just wants to talk.”

Alec doesn’t know what the hell to say to that or what to do to try and get them out of the stand-off, but Nolan winds up mooting it. Alec hears a scrabbling sound behind him and Mason’s muffled cursing, and then Nolan yells, “You’re full of shit, Richmond!”

The hunter’s—Richmond’s—gaze jumps from Alec back towards the landing; Alec isn’t willing to take his eyes off of Richmond and the other hunters to check but he can hear the sounds of Mason and Nolan grappling behind him, guesses that Nolan is trying to come forward and Mason is trying to hold him back.

“Nolan,” Richmond greets, his voice thick with an oily sort of amusement, “Good to see you again.”

“Go fuck yourself!” Nolan replies acidically, still sounding half-distracted by his struggles with Mason, “Rossler and Preston said they ‘just wanted to talk,’ too!”

There’s more scuffling and Alec desperately wants to tell Nolan to stop, but he’s terrified if he splits his attention from the hunters it’s all going to be over. He’d forgotten that Nolan used to be part of Monroe’s band; it’s so difficult to imagine, so hard to reconcile with the only version of Nolan that Alec has ever known, that even now, having just heard Nolan identify Richmond by sight, having just heard Richmond greet Nolan like a misbehaving younger brother, it still doesn’t seem real. But it must be real enough to Nolan; Alec can smell the thin thread of shame that starts to weave through his already-roiling scent.

Below him, Richmond shakes his head, and when he speaks he’s talking to Nolan, but he’s looking at Alec, “Rossler was an idiot. He was never supposed to lay a hand on you, just bring you back home.”

The way he says _home_ sends a shiver of feeling down Alec’s spine that he has to ruthlessly smother; he’s already given too much away, no matter how creepy and cult-like Richmond sounds. Richmond smiles like he saw it regardless and refocuses his full attention on Alec.

“Alec, c’mon,” He coaxes, “There’s nothing you can do. Either all three of you can come with us willingly and _unharmed_ , or we can kill you just like we killed your friend Theo and take Mason and Nolan anyway.”

Alec feels his whole body flinch when Richmond says _just like we killed your friend Theo_ , hears Mason and Nolan go still in surprise, their scents souring as they connect the earlier gunfire with Richmond’s claim. And then there’s a sudden burst of noise behind him, Nolan snarling out a wordless protest, and Alec can’t help it, he turns his head just in time to see Nolan get loose from Mason’s restraining hands and start to stand. _No, no, no,_ Alec thinks frantically, as in front of him, one of Richmond’s lackeys starts to bring his gun back up to point at Nolan; weirdly enough, Alec believes that they won’t shoot, but the _threat_ of it would be enough to end the confrontation regardless.

Alec turns and surges upward, manages to knock Nolan back into the corner of the landing with Mason a half-second before the hunter would have gotten a bead on him. But that presents its own problems, Richmond and his friends taking immediate advantage of Alec’s distraction to start moving back up the steps. Whipping back around, Alec lunges forward to stop them, swiping out with one clawed hand; the hunters stumble back a few steps to avoid the strike. Alec catches the irritated grimace on Richmond’s face, and apparently he’s had enough negotiating, because he brings his gun to bear, his finger going to the trigger; Alec has just enough time to throw himself flat on the stairs before a spray of gunfire cuts the air above his head, deafeningly loud in the confined space.

But Richmond limits himself to the one burst, possibly because he thinks he’s made his point or possibly because he’s remembering his orders to bring them back unharmed. Whatever the reason, Alec whirls back to his feet and into a crouching position, clawed hands out wide and mouth stretched in a fierce snarl, mentally sagging in relief when he hears Mason and Nolan shifting behind him, their breathing quick and shallow but _there_.

Richmond glares at him from behind the stock of his gun, “Last chance, mutt.”

Alec’s only response, primal and instinctual and without conscious thought, is to open his mouth wide in a savage roar. Richmond’s eyes widen and then his expression twists with a single-minded hatred, and he fires again. Alec manages to throw himself to the side of the first burst and crouches, preparing to attack, and then a blur of color scythes downward from a few landings up. The gunfire cuts off suddenly, Alec watching in shock as Richmond drops his gun to clutch at his suddenly torn-open throat. Theo—because it _is_ Theo, Alec realizes almost immediately—moves instantly to slam one of the other hunters against the wall hard enough to crush his ribcage even as Richmond collapses, then drives his clawed hand into the last hunter’s gut.

The sudden silence in the stairwell so soon after the flurry of gunfire is almost painful in and of itself, broken only by Theo’s arrhythmic, panting breaths and the last, dying gasps of the hunters at his feet. Alec stares at Theo, heedless of the hunters, his whole mind just one endless, looping thought; _Theo isn’t dead_. But then he spots the three oozing black wounds on Theo’s body—left calf, right thigh, right chest—and he catches the sickly smell of Theo’s blood, and his relief freezes immediately back into horror.

_He’s dying_ , Alec realizes with simple, immediate, and crystalline clarity.

Theo looks up at him, and Alec sees that knowledge reflected in his eyes. Theo grimaces, and maybe he would have said something, but his left leg suddenly gives out from under him and he collapses against the wall. Alec can’t move, caught by the dull shine of the smear of black blood Theo leaves on the wall as he uses one hand to force himself back upright, snarling as he goes.

He’s broken out of his thoughts when Theo snaps, “Come _on_. We have to keep moving.”

And Alec may have refused to move, may have demanded that Theo tell them what to do, how to _fix him_ , but Theo catches his eyes again and there’s a pleading sort of desperation there, all his earlier cold-bloodedness stripped away. Alec responds to it helplessly, automatically, turning to check on Mason and Nolan. They’re already on their way down towards him, and Alec remembers what Theo had said before— _keep Mason and Nolan behind you_ —and so he starts moving before they can pass him, puts himself back between the empty space of the stairwell—where more hunters could appear at any moment—and them.

Mason, though—Mason pauses next to Theo, and Alec hears him say, “You’re hurt.”

Theo answers, “I’ll live. Go.”

Alec has to resist the hysterical urge to turn around and call him a liar; Theo _won’t_ and he _knows it_ , and lying to Mason isn’t going to change that fact. But Alec just grits his teeth and keeps moving forward; the only thing that drawing attention to Theo’s outright bullshit can do is get them all caught and potentially killed.

He’s nearly past the second floor landing when Theo barks out _no_ , and Alec skids to a stop, turns to look up at him, confused. Theo explains that there will be more hunters in the lobby, that they need to go out and over one of the balconies of the second floor apartments, but Alec is only half paying attention to his words, to Mason when he points out that Theo’s truck is likely to be guarded; Theo has once more collapsed against the wall, the entire right side of his shirt drenched in black blood and the scent of him like something already half-dead. So when Theo answers Mason by saying _that’s why I’m going out first_ , says that he’ll take care of whoever’s waiting so that Alec, Mason, and Nolan can follow, Alec speaks before he’s consciously aware that he’s decided to.

“I’m going with you,” He tells Theo.

He means it to sound final, to leave no room for argument, but Theo just shakes his head, “No, you’re not,” Then again, when Alec goes to protest, “ _No_ , you’re _not_. Someone has got to get Mason and Nolan out of here.”

“Yeah, both of us,” Alec counters, and he’s aware of how childish he sounds, how much he wants Theo to agree because it’d mean that Theo actually thinks he has a chance of getting out of here alive, rather than already having resigned himself to dying so that Alec, Mason, and Nolan can get away.

But Theo isn’t willing to play along, “Alec.” He says gently, rolling his head on the wall to look at Alec like picking it up and moving it would cost him more than he has to offer.

_God,_ fuck you _for this_ , Alec thinks helplessly, even as he opens his mouth—almost in-sync with Mason and Nolan—to say something, Alec isn’t even sure what exactly, about not leaving Theo behind. But Theo just cuts a hand through the air to silence them, and looks briefly and a little heartbreakingly bemused when they comply.

“You can’t help me. They only thing you can do is get captured, too, and used against Scott and the others,” Theo tells them quietly, and that’s it, that’s the end of Alec’s self-deception right there. But then Theo has to go and twist the knife a little more, “But if you get out, you can go get help and come save my sorry ass.”

He tries to smile but his body locks up at that moment and he grimaces instead. When he manages to focus his eyes again he catches Alec’s, and Alec sees then that the lie he’d just told—the lies he’s been telling—haven’t been for Alec, but for Mason and Nolan; Theo knows Alec can smell the sickness—the death—on Theo, knows he’s not fooling Alec. It’s like a physical blow, and Alec starts to move forward; maybe he can’t heal Theo, but he can at least take some of the pain so clearly wracking Theo’s body. But Theo jerks out of reach and shakes his head, orders him to save his strength in a soft, regretful voice.

Then he tilts his head back, face twisting with pain as he concentrates—listening for the hunters, Alec bets—and then opens his eyes, meets Alec’s, and orders quietly, “Apartment on the left side. Go.”

Alec stares at him for a long, painful second, and then he swallows down the wounded noise trying desperately to get past his teeth and goes. He ignores the sound of Theo struggling to breathe behind him, though it eats at his guts like acid, and concentrates on getting them to the door of the left-side apartment, breaks in effortlessly. He’s nearly to the balcony door when Theo stops him, steps out to get a read on the situation himself.

And Alec finds himself staring helplessly at Mason and Nolan, both of them looking back at him with the same, equally stricken expressions. Mason glances out the glass of the balcony door at Theo briefly, and then steps forward to put a hand on Alec’s arm. Alec braces himself, unsure what Mason is planning on asking but willing to take an educated guess that it’s something along the lines of _how bad is he_ , to which Alec has no idea how to respond. Does he keep Theo’s poorly-disguised secret? Tell them the truth? Neither is going to _help_ , necessarily, but they’re what he has.

But Theo comes back in the next moment and Mason has to let him go. Theo must miss Mason moving away from him because he doesn’t comment, one arm wrapped around his chest and his breathing harsh and uneven.

“You’re going to need to follow me down almost immediately,” He tells them, breathless with strain, “They’re going to know the second I hit the ground what you’re trying to do. I can keep the three by my truck occupied while you three get in the truck and go.”  
  
“Theo—” Alec starts, but Theo cuts him off almost immediately.

“Alec, stop,” Theo orders him, obviously trying to sound forceful even though he only manages to sound painfully exhausted. Alec has to close his eyes briefly when Theo hooks a hand around the back of his neck, draws him in so they’re forehead to forehead, “Once you get on the road, you drive to Shohreh, okay? You drive to Yreka and Shohreh and you don’t slow down or turn around or stop for anything until you’ve gotten Mason and Nolan safely to her.” Theo must see something on his face, some hint of the pain tearing up Alec’s insides, because he shakes Alec a bit with the hand he’s got on the back of Alec’s neck, “ _Alec_. I don’t care what happens, or who calls to say everything’s alright—Scott, Argent, me—I don’t care. You _don’t stop_ until you get them to Shohreh. Do you understand me?”  
  
And what’s Alec supposed to say, _no, I don’t understand, no, I won’t_? There’s nothing _to_ say, so he promises Theo quietly, “I understand.” Then again, when Theo’s grip tightens just short of pain, “ _I understand_.”

Theo breathes out, _okay, okay, good_ , nearly sagging with relief—maybe he did think Alec was going to try and fight him on it—and that more than anything breaks Alec’s resolve to not make this any more difficult on Theo than it must already be: he brings a hand up and clamps Theo’s to his neck before Theo can finish pulling away. Theo looks at him in surprise and Alec feels his expression crack open, his vulnerability and terror and desperation just spilling out of him.

But even still he has the good sense to lower his voice enough that Mason and Nolan won’t hear him when he begs, “Please don’t ask me to leave you here to die.”

Theo’s expression spasms with pain and he stares at Alec in a heartbroken sort of horror. He pulls Alec back in so they’re once more forehead to forehead, and that’s when Alec knows that it’s over. That Theo may still be alive and breathing in front of him now, but in five minutes, ten, he won’t be, and they both know it. All that Theo has left—all that Alec can give him—is the knowledge that he can buy Alec’s, Mason’s, and Nolan’s safety with his death.

“I’m sorry,” Theo tells him, sincerity soaked through every syllable, and that just makes it infinitely worse. Then he pulls back and meets Alec’s eyes, his regret and his determination no longer hidden, and says—and _pleads_ , “Get them to Shohreh safely.”

Alec bites down savagely on the swell of grief that threatens to choke him and promises, “I will, I swear.”

\---

There are a lot of really, truly inane thoughts racing through Alec’s mind as he gets Mason hauled up and moving towards Theo’s truck, as he yells at Nolan to get it unlocked and get inside.

They’re buried under more immediate concerns—the best route to take to get out of Beacon Hills, keeping his body between Monroe’s hunters’ guns and Mason, how they’re going to explain this shitshow to Scott—but they’re _there_ : that the bullet-holes punched through the truck’s rear bumper are going to seriously affect its resale value; that Derek is going to have to find someone very open-minded to clean Theo’s blood off of the walls of the stairwell; that packing up all of the various pack _tchotchkes_ in Theo’s apartment is going to be the absolute worst part of burying him.

That promise or no promise, Alec is never going to forgive himself for this.

A _crack_ of gunfire cuts through the noise in his head and he catches the wet noise of a bullet tearing through flesh and then Theo’s choked gasp, but he promised—he _promised_ —so he doesn’t turn his head to look, just scrambles up into Theo’s truck on Nolan’s heels, Mason diving into the backseat, and gets the door slammed shut. He gets the keys in the ignition, the truck in drive, and shoves his foot down on the accelerator, but then he can’t help it; the desperate clawing feeling in his chest overrides his good sense and he slams on the brakes. He fumbles the door open and leans out, and even he can tell that his expression is pathetically vulnerable, pleading, his resolve back in the apartment be damned.

He watches as Theo glances over his shoulder at him, and the naked desire on his face to try for the open door is _there_ , right along with all the blackened blood he’d been coughing up, but then a bullet slams into the door handle just inches from Alec’s arm and Theo turns back to the hunters. Alec doesn’t even need Theo’s shouted instruction to know that Theo isn’t going to risk it, and Alec turns back forward and yanks the door shut even as a pained noise rips unbidden from his throat. He jams his foot back down on the accelerator and gets them moving again, gets them roaring forward, the truck jerking some with the impact force of the bullets slamming into its rear.

Mason and Nolan have the good sense to keep low as the first few shots hit, but it doesn’t last; as Alec reaches the parking lot exit, they scramble back upright, facing backwards in their seats as they stare back at Theo through the truck’s rear window. Alec can’t fault them for it, since his eyes fly to the rearview mirror and stick there even as he whips the truck into a tight turn, gets them out and onto the road.

It means that even as Alec notes the two black SUVs that come tearing out of the parking lot after them, his attention is fixed on Theo as Theo collapses first to his knees, then to one arm, then to a crumpled form on the parking lot asphalt. It means that he’s still watching—his foot pressed nearly to the floor as he pushes the truck to its limits—when the circle of hunters closes around Theo and he disappears from view.

Alec wrenches his gaze back to the road with a wounded cry and slams his hand down hard against the edge of the steering wheel once, twice, three times, and then he swallows it all down; he locks the grief and despair away in his ribs, and he focuses on nothing else but getting Mason and Nolan to Shohreh safely, just like he promised Theo he would.

\---

Nolan and Mason give him exactly as long as it takes Alec to lose Monroe’s hunters in the twisting back roads near the Preserve, and then they start begging him to turn around.

They move through arguments quickly, trying them out and discarding them as Alec stays facing stiffly forward, just keeps repeating _no_ , and _we can’t_ , and _we have to get to Yreka_. They keep cycling through them and it isn’t until Mason starts trying to negotiate—what if they didn’t go to Shohreh, what if they could convince Shohreh to come to them?—that Alec finds himself thinking, _god, they’re moving through the five stages of grief_ , the voice in his head sounding suspiciously like Theo at his most tongue-in-cheek, and he chokes on a completely inappropriate swell of laughter. He swallows it, though: he knows that if he let it out, it’d be completely hysterical, and the truck cab already reeks of grief and fear and the acidic, sickening sting of Theo’s poisoned blood; it doesn’t need Alec’s unhinged laughter making it worse.

But grief isn’t linear, and Mason may have gotten himself all the way to bargaining—long exposure to Beacon Hills in general and the insanity that McCall pack membership seems to bring with it in particular, maybe—but Nolan doesn’t have the same experience, and his ability to process seems to snag on anger; Alec nearly swerves into the oncoming lane when Nolan lunges at him unexpectedly from the front seat.

“Nolan!” Alec shouts, startled, one hand flying out reflexively to catch him and hold him at bay, the other yanking the wheel to get them back on the right side of the road, horns going off all around them.

But Nolan doesn’t seem to notice Alec’s tone or Alec’s restraining hand planted on his chest; he pushes forward against it, demanding, “We have to turn around, we have to go back.”

Alec glances at him helplessly, then pulls his gaze back to the road, Nolan’s cracked-open expression hitting him like a gut-punch just below the sternum, “We _can’t_. We turn around and we’ll just get captured, too, then used against Scott and the others.”

“They’re going to kill him!” Nolan yells, ignoring both Alec and Mason, who’d reached forward to put a hand on Nolan’s shoulder, try and tug him back and away from Alec.

“Nolan…” Alec starts brokenly.

He doesn’t know how to tell him—tell them both—that chances are Theo is already dead. That Theo had already known he was going to die in the stairwell, and he’d known it in the apartment, and—perhaps worst of all—he’d known that Alec had known it, too. But Alec doesn’t think that hearing all that is going to make Mason or Nolan feel better.

He thinks that hearing it would, in all likelihood, make them feel a whole hell of a lot worse.

The silence drags on too long; Nolan makes a furious noise and lunges forward again, and this time Alec can’t help it, has to shove him back or risk losing control of the truck. Nolan’s body impacts the opposite door with a dull _thud_ and his head cracks against the glass of the window, his breath leaving him in a punched-out rush. Alec stares at him, absolutely horrified; he hadn’t _meant_ …

“Nolan, jesus, I’m sorry,” Alec chokes out, but Nolan just struggles upright, undeterred.

“If you don’t turn around, it’s going to be your fault when he dies,” Nolan snarls, his tone and expression absolutely vicious.

“Nolan—” Mason tries to interject, to protest, but Nolan’s accusing glare, the overwhelming, frothing tide of fear and grief that’s so clearly lurking underneath his flash-bang anger; Alec doesn’t know what to _do_ , so he does the only thing he can think of.

“He’s already dead, Nolan,” He whispers brokenly, because there’s no point in hiding it anymore, and it’s clearly not doing anyone any favors; almost without thought, Alec brings one hand up to the back of his neck where Theo had gripped him, earlier, had made him swear to protect Mason and Nolan even though it meant making Alec an accessory to Theo’s self-sacrifice.

All of the color seems to drain out of Nolan’s face, and even Mason in the backseat—Alec catching brief sight of him in the rearview—goes completely still.

“...what?” Nolan asks after a long few seconds of stunned silence.

“You and Mason both saw, the bullets were poisoned,” Alec tells him, feels the shift start to stir underneath his skin, feels the pricks of his own claws on the back of his neck, “He’d already been shot three times when he caught up with us, and they shot him again while we were escaping.”

“There must still be time, though, we can heal him,” Mason argues, “It’s happened before, we’ve done it before. Before you came, when Nolan…”

He cuts himself off but the damage is already done; Nolan’s face twists in pain and his whole body flinches. Alec darts another glance at him, an unwanted flash of insight striking him as he realizes just _why_ Nolan has been fighting him so hard, but Nolan doesn’t look up, just stares sightlessly down at the seat in front of him, his whole scent gone sharp and stinging with shame and distress. Alec forces himself to turn back to the road, to keep explaining: the truth will be a cold comfort, but it’s all he _has_ , and more importantly; it’s the truth.

“He wasn’t poisoned like this. Whatever strain of wolfsbane they used in their bullets, it was strong. I could smell—” Here Alec falters, not wanting the memory his explanation evokes, but it’s too late: the scent clogs up his nostrils again, burning, almost like he has Theo trembling and already half-dead in front of him again, “His body was already shutting down in the stairwell, let alone the apartment. Unless—unless they burned it out of him almost immediately, it’s been too long. He’d already be—”

He can’t bring himself to say it again, but he doesn’t need to. All of Nolan’s righteous anger drains out of him and he slumps back against the seat, staring at the side of Alec’s face, his own expression ripped open and raw. In the backseat, Mason covers his mouth with his hands and sits slowly back, his eyes staring sightlessly out of the windshield.

“I’m sorry,” Alec tells them, voice trembling, though he doesn’t even know what he’s apologizing _for_ ; he thinks back to Theo earlier confessing the exact same thing to him, and feels his eyes start to burn.

They all sit in heavy silence for a few long minutes, the only sound that of the traffic rushing by them on the highway. Even throughout his argument with Nolan, Alec had kept his eyes and senses peeled for signs that the hunters had somehow managed to pick their trail back up, maybe guess where they’re headed, but there’s nothing. It’s almost worse, really; the quiet, steady curve of the world turning ever onward, like the tragedy that had just played out meant nothing to anyone outside of the truck’s cab.

Partly to distract himself from his maudlin, manifestly unhelpful thoughts, Alec brings both hands back to the steering wheel, tightens them, “We need to call Scott and tell him what happened.”

But he makes no move to reach for his phone, and neither does Nolan, now with his head turned firmly towards the window, hiding his face, his shoulders shaking.

“I’ll do it,” Mason offers quietly from the backseat, meeting Alec’s eyes in the rearview when Alec darts a look at him; his mouth twists in a sympathetic grimace and Alec jerks his gaze back forward, his chest clenching painfully.

Alec keeps his eyes on the road but can’t help listening as Mason pulls out his phone, hits Scott’s name and brings it to his ear. He can hear the tinny sound of it ringing, ringing, but Scott doesn’t answer; Alec feels a spike of panic and has to force it back down, Theo’s voice in his head saying _don’t jump to conclusions_. His eyes catch Mason’s in the rearview again and he sees some of his same anxiety reflected there—Corey is with Scott, after all—but Mason just jerks his eyes back down to his phone, scrolls to a different contact and taps it to connect the call.

Alec nearly slumps in relief when, seconds later, he hears Corey’s soft _Mason?_ , but his shoulders immediately winch back up; something about Corey’s tone—even through the shit quality of the call—off. Sharpening his hearing, Alec focuses on the background noise coming through the line, can just barely hear Scott and Stiles talking, Derek making some kind of demand. But Mason stays focused, just tells Corey _something happened back home_ , and Alec has to glue his eyes back to the road to help dampen the sudden swell of despair that rises in him as Mason talks; listening to Mason describe the attack feels somehow worse than having just lived it.

And then Mason tells Corey, stopping and starting as his voice breaks and his throat seems to close around the words, “Corey, listen. Alec thinks that...Alec is pretty sure that...” And here Mason has to pause, has to suck in a few huge gulps of air, “Corey...Theo is dead.”

Beside Alec, Nolan lets out a bitten-off sound and burrows harder against the door, his scent sharp and stinging with renewed grief. Alec tightens his hands around the steering wheel and hears the leather creak in protest, loosens them, resists his urge to reach out to Nolan, the urge to waver, say _maybe I’m wrong_ , just for the chance, for the possibility. But false hope isn’t going to do anyone any favors, and neither Theo nor Alec had seen any way out for Theo, standing forehead to forehead in that empty apartment: either the hunters were going to finish him off with another few point-blank shots or they’d stand by and watch his body finish shutting down from the wolfsbane already poisoning him, but he’d been as good as dead and they’d both known it.

The stunned silence on the line doesn’t last. Alec hears Corey repeat Mason’s message to Scott and the others. Or most of it, anyway; he can’t seem to finish the statement, the rest of it left trailing: _Mason says that Theo…_ Hearing someone else say it is like confirmation, makes it real, and Alec hunches over the steering wheel, his own mouth clenched tight around the pained, grieving noise that wants to escape the prison of his teeth.

There’s a burst of static and commotion on the line and then Alec hears Liam, voice gone sharp with thinly-veiled desperation: _Mason says what about Theo, Corey? Mason says what?_ Alec starts to imagine what Liam must look like and then immediately has to stop, has to shove the image away, the thought burning like closing his hand around raw wolfsbane; god, and he’d thought Theo had been abstractly worried about Liam getting hurt, and now—and _now…_ Mason keeps talking to Corey but Alec misses whatever he says, all his focus on what he can make out of Liam’s reaction through the sounds coming through Corey’s phone’s speakers. The sound of Liam’s struggles, his frantic denials, shred Alec’s insides, but it feels right somehow; a just punishment for caving to Theo’s demand to leave him behind, right as it may have been.

Alec’s so caught up in his own cloying self-loathing that he jumps when he feels a hand on his shoulder; his gaze flies to Mason’s in the rearview and he sees then that his own eyes have flared golden with his distress. Mason just meets his burning gaze steadily and squeezes his shoulder with one hand, his other hand still holding his phone to his ear. His expression sharpens for a beat but he doesn’t take his hand away from Alec, just stares out the windshield, listening.

“We can’t go back, Scott,” Alec hears Mason say quietly, and Alec realizes that Scott must have taken the phone from Corey, “Alec won’t.”

Alec flinches like Mason has just accused him of something and his hands clench on the steering wheel, every rational explanation he wants to give, every valid justification for his refusal to turn around drowned out by the frantic, looping voice in his head shouting _I promised Theo I wouldn’t turn around until I got you and Nolan to Shohreh_. He looks at Mason in the rearview out of pure desperation but Mason just shakes his head softly, his expression open and exhausted, but ultimately; understanding. He digs his blunt human nails into Alec’s shoulder, the pressure cracking some of Alec’s spiraling thoughts.

“Theo made Alec promise he wouldn’t turn around until he got me and Nolan to Shohreh safely,” Mason explains quietly, and the absence of any judgement in his tone—the opposite of it, in fact—rends through the last of Alec’s already tattered defenses and his chest starts to heave, “He made Alec promise that before he…before he went to fight the last of the hunters, buy us time to get away.”

Scott must read between Mason’s lines because he just answers _jesus_ , breathy and pained. He stops trying to convince Mason to turn around, just tells him to call Scott and the others when they arrive in Yreka. Mason agrees and then Alec hears the call disconnect, Scott’s last words— _we’re going back for him_ —echoing in his head.

Mason tosses his phone onto the seat and doesn’t let go of Alec’s shoulder, just slumps forward so that he’s leaning heavily against the front seat and tips his head down, hiding it from view. Alec keeps his eyes on the road even though his vision is swimming, his nose burning with the scent of Mason’s and Nolan’s grief and the phantom, sickenly-sweet smell of Theo’s poisoned blood. He jerks when Nolan suddenly reaches over and grips his right hand on the steering wheel, but after darting a quick, surprised look at him—Nolan’s face still turned away towards the window—Alec lets him pull it away and thread his fingers through Alec’s own, lets him squeeze tight, tight enough that Alec can feel his bones grinding together.

But he doesn’t let go, and he doesn’t stop driving them north to Yreka, to Shohreh; he keeps his hand around Nolan’s and feels Mason’s fingers digging into his shoulder, and he drives.

\---

Twenty minutes after they cross into Yreka pack territory, Alec sees flashing blue-and-red lights in the rearview and feels a spike of panic so sudden and so sharp that he finds himself hunching defensively over the center of himself. His mind starts racing, his palms suddenly sweaty on the steering wheel; hadn’t one of Monroe’s followers pretended to be a cop that one time, with the werewolf who’d turned out to be the other half of the Anuk-ite? Alec can swear he remembers Theo telling him that, the warning clear: _assume nothing_. He’s no closer to deciding what to do, Nolan and Mason blinking themselves awake from where they’d fallen into exhausted sleep halfway to Yreka, when Alec checks the rearview again and this time manages to catch the flared golden eyes of the officer driving the police car.

_Oh, thank god_ , Alec thinks, his panic giving way to relief and then, as he gently guides the truck to the side of the road, a little embarrassment; he can vaguely remember meeting a handful of Shohreh’s betas after his rescue, and two of them had been police officers. _McPherson_ , Alec thinks; the male officer’s name had been McPherson.

Now safely to the side of the road, Alec throws the truck into park and turns off the engine, rolls down the window. The sudden blast of cool winter air is a shock, but it also seems to clear out the stifled air of the cab. Alec takes a deep breath of it and has to close his eyes in relief, the sharp bite of the wind washing away the still-lingering, phantom scent of Theo’s poisoned blood; Alec had spent the last two hours choking on it.

Beside him, Nolan shivers a bit—none of them had really been prepared to flee for their lives when they’d left Alec’s apartment, and he’s only wearing his lacrosse hoodie—but when Alec frowns over at him, concerned, he shakes his head, his message clear: _I’m fine_. Alec watches him a bit longer, then glances in the rearview to check on Mason; his grief is still all over his face and he looks wary—he wouldn’t have been able to see the officer’s flared eyes—but he nods at Alec, trusting.

Alec swallows, unsure what to do with that, and turns his attention back to the officer walking towards them.

McPherson reaches the open window and peers in at them, his eyes back to being a normal, human brown. But once he catches sight of Alec, a flash of recognition crossing his face, and sees—and likely smells—the wariness coming off of Nolan and Mason, he flares them again; Alec can almost feel the way that both Nolan and Mason go suddenly boneless with relief.

McPherson quirks them a sympathetic smile and looks back at Alec, explains, “One of ours caught your scent crossing the territory line, didn’t recognize it. But you’re with McCall’s pack, from the smell of you. And I remember you from that shitshow with the refugee pack. It’s Alec, right?”

Alec freezes and feels himself staring, stricken, at McPherson, hearing Richmond’s snake-charmer voice in his head saying, _it’s Alec, right?_ He gets a little lost in the memory, in the remembered, stifled closeness of the stairwell, and doesn’t snap out of it until Mason says his name softly. He jumps and shakes his head, refocuses on McPherson.

“Uh, yeah. Yes. It’s Alec, and we’re, uh. We’re with—with the McCall pack. Shit. We should have called, shouldn’t we? I’m really sorry, it’s been—” He glances at Nolan, and then at Mason, helplessly; how _to_ describe how it’d been?

But McPherson just shakes his head, and there’s an unexpected sort of understanding in his gaze as he cranes his head slightly to look at something behind Alec—though Alec has no idea what—and then says, “Don’t worry about it. Seems like you had other things on your minds.”

Alec flinches, seeing again Theo collapsing into a heap on the asphalt, disappearing behind the circle of hunters. Even with the cool breeze coming in through the open window, Alec’s mind dredges up the phantom smell of Theo’s poisoned blood, and Alec grimaces. The leather of the steering wheel creaks in protest when he tightens his hands around it reflexively, but the sound is enough to break him out of his spiraling thoughts and he lets it go abruptly, drops his hands into his lap.

“Uh, yeah,” He starts, then has to stop and swallow a few times past his suddenly tight throat, “There was…Back in Beacon Hills, there was—”

_An attack_ , Alec tries to say, _Back in Beacon Hills, there was an attack_. But he can’t seem to do it, because he knows the second he finishes saying it, he’s going to have to add, _our friend was killed_. He knows how stupid it is, how utterly inconsequential the refusal to say it aloud is. But it’d been bad enough having to wield that knowledge like a weapon against Nolan earlier, and hearing Mason repeat it to Corey and the others—and then hearing Liam’s grief through the tinny phone speakers—had been worse.

He doesn’t want to have to say it again.

And apparently he doesn’t need to, or at least not yet; McPherson interrupts his stuttered explanation gently, “Don’t. Not here. Let’s get you all to Shohreh. That way you’ll only have to explain it once.”

Alec nods, bottom lip caught painfully beneath his teeth. McPherson watches him for a second longer and then straightens from where he’d been leaning some into the open window, turns and speaks into the radio on his shoulder: _All good, it’s three of McCall’s. Tell Shohreh we’re headed her way_. Then he looks back down at Alec.

“Follow me there, alright?” He requests.

“Yeah, yes. Thanks,” Alec says, relieved; he’d known how to get to Yreka, but he’d spent the ten minutes before McPherson had pulled them over wracking his brain to try and remember the exact way to the sprawling ranch house where Shohreh lives with her pack, unwilling to either wake Nolan or Mason to ask for their help or to risk distracting Scott and the others by calling them.

McPherson nods and turns, heads back to his patrol car. Alec takes another few deep breaths and then starts the truck’s engine, moves to put the window back up. He stops when he feels a gentle pressure on his arm and looks over at Nolan.

“Leave it down,” Nolan says quietly.

“What, why?” Alec asks, brow furrowing, “You’re already cold, I can tell.”

Nolan shrugs and looks away from Alec, taking his hand back; Alec stifles the soft protest that wants to leave his throat at the loss of warmth, “I don’t know. You seem more relaxed with it down.”

Alec stares at him, caught and more than a little surprised; he _is_ more relaxed, the cool winter air somehow holding at bay the persistent memory of the scent of Theo’s poisoned blood, but he wouldn’t have expected Nolan to notice that. He hesitates for a second longer, torn, but then McPherson pulls past him in his patrol car and Alec has to follow.

“Okay,” Alec agrees quietly, abandoning the window controls to pull back onto the road, “Um. Thanks.”

Nolan nods but doesn’t say anything, his attention once more focused out the window, his hoodie sleeves pulled over his hands and his arms folded tightly across his chest. Alec darts a quick look at him, his chest clenching—Theo’s blood isn’t the only scent the cold is muting, Nolan’s grief and the lingering thread of his shame also now buried under the sharp air—but Nolan doesn’t look back. Swallowing, Alec checks the rearview and sees Mason looking back at him; Mason quirks a small, sad smile at him and Alec returns it, even as it makes the tight feeling in his chest worse.

_God, what a trio we make_ , Alec thinks helplessly, and then—picturing Theo as he’d been just before he’d gone to fight the last of the hunters, the knowledge of his own pending fate heavy in his eyes—he thinks that Theo may have saved all their lives, but that they didn’t exactly get out unscathed. Alec tightens his hands on the steering wheel and concentrates best he can on setting aside all his heavy, useless thoughts, focuses on following McPherson to Shohreh, to the fulfillment of his promise. But one thought slips through, and lingers; _I’m never going to forgive you for this_.

Alec just isn’t sure who he means: Theo, or himself.

\---

Alec only has half his attention on McPherson as he follows him into the sprawling ranch house that the Yreka pack uses as a sort of headquarters, the rest of it on Mason and Nolan a few steps behind him.

He’d lost sight of them for a handful of brief seconds in the driveway, and the sudden swell of terror that’d burst open in his chest had nearly stolen his breath. It’d faded almost immediately when they’d come around the front of the truck to stand next to him, but it’d been replaced with a low-grade and constant sort of anxiety that Alec can still feel gnawing at his guts. McPherson, coming up to meet them, had given Alec a sympathetic look that Alec found he couldn’t meet, embarrassment mixing with nausea in a sickening tangle in his stomach.

Alec knows he’s being ridiculous, but the house and the very ground beneath their feet are saturated with a deep, unfamiliar smell that Alec realizes must be the Yreka pack scent, and his instincts feel like someone has cranked them up to eleven; he hadn’t realized how much the close air of the truck cab, rich with Mason and Nolan’s living, breathing scents—and underneath those, the subtler scents of Theo and the McCall pack itself—had been soothing the ragged edge of his nerves. Now, even though he can hear Mason and Nolan behind him and can smell them close and in arms-reach, there’s an insistent part of his lizard-brain that wants to corral them back to the truck, get them off of another pack’s territory and to somewhere safe.

_Get a fucking grip,_ Alec mentally berates himself. He’s so caught up in that thought that he nearly runs into McPherson, who stops in the entryway to a spacious living room occupied here and there with various people. Alec stumbles to a halt, McPherson stepping easily out of the way to prevent a collision. He doesn’t put a hand out or otherwise reach to steady him, which is definitely deliberate and desperately appreciated: Alec isn’t sure he could handle having a member of a different pack touch him right now, though the thought isn’t conscious until he catches the careful way McPherson moves to avoid him. Helplessly grateful and aware of what a humiliating mess he is, Alec flashes him a quick, jagged smile; McPherson tilts him a brief nod in acknowledgement.

In the next instant his attention is yanked back forward as Shohreh stands from where she’d been seated at a large wooden table with a handful of her betas, and comes forward. The uncomfortable, half-panicked feeling in Alec’s chest gets tighter and more claustrophobic as she gets closer, and while Alec has the good sense to realize he’s reacting to another alpha not his own, he can’t seem to make himself _stop_. From the considered look in Shohreh’s eyes, she knows exactly what’s racing through Alec’s head, but she doesn’t coddle him; she keeps coming forward until she’s just a few feet from Alec, and then she suddenly reaches forward with one hand and takes hold of the back of his head, presses it gently but firmly down.

Confused, Alec acquiesces to the pressure and holds still as she seems to study something on the back of his neck, and then her hand disappears and he straightens back up.

“So Theo is dead then,” She confirms bluntly, and Alec jerks and stares at her in shock.

“How did you…?” He starts to ask, but Shohreh cuts him off.

“That poisoned blood on the back of your neck reeks of werewolf and coyote. Last I checked, there was only one shapeshifter running around with both of those in his DNA,” She answers impatiently, then demands, “What happened?”

But Alec’s distracted and almost doesn’t hear her question, his hand flying to the top of his spine. When he brings his fingers back forward to look at them there’s nothing, but there wouldn’t be, would there? Theo’s blood—his _poisoned blood_ —would have long since dried from when Theo had no doubt smeared it across the back of Alec’s neck when he’d grabbed him back in the apartment. _Oh, god_ , Alec thinks, and feels bile start to rise in his throat; no wonder he’d kept thinking he was smelling Theo’s blood back in the truck; he _had_ been.

“Alec,” Shohreh interrupts his spiraling thoughts sharply.

Alec flinches and looks back at her, wide-eyed, “I, uh. I’m—I’m sorry.”

Her expression softens some and she brings her hands up, cups his face and runs her thumbs gently over his cheekbones. Alec had started to shy away from the touch, his instincts protesting, but once her skin touches his own, Alec has to close his eyes against the sudden sting of tears that comes as some of the terror that’d frozen—pushed down and ignored as best he’d been able—around his ribs cracks. His hands come up almost of their own volition to hold her wrists gently; he doesn’t know what it is, some super secret alpha trick or whatever, but the physical connection soothes something ragged in Alec, his hindbrain recognizing her as an alpha and an ally, even if not his own.

“It was Monroe,” He tells her, his voice cracking, “She tricked Scott and the others somehow, got them out of town, and then she sent her hunters after the three of us and Theo.”

Shohreh nods, her hold still gentle around Alec’s face and her thumbs never pausing in their slow, soothing sweeps, “But you three got away. How?”

Alec closes his eyes and takes a huge, stuttered breath, his chest constricting painfully, “Theo. He held them off, bought us enough time to get out and into his truck.”

“He told Alec to come here,” Mason adds quietly, “He made Alec swear that he’d bring us here to you.”

“At least that part of his plan was sensible,” Shohreh comments, then sighs and gently disentangles herself from Alec, who reluctantly drops his hold, “The getting shot multiple times with poisoned bullets—I assume that was what happened?” Alec nods, and she continues, “That part…” She looks away—Alec sees her jaw clench, the edge of her scent growing heavy with grief, like the hem of a coat slowing getting wet—then finishes, “What a stupid way to die.”

“Don’t say that!”

Alec jumps and jerks to look at Nolan, who takes a few furious steps towards Shohreh; for a wild second Alec wonders if he plans to hit her, or something equally insane. He looks at McPherson for backup, but McPherson doesn’t move; his expression is somber and sympathetic and painfully understanding, and he just watches Nolan silently, sentinel-like.

“What the hell do you know? You weren’t there!” Nolan snarls, voice hot with anger and, lurking underneath it, an overwhelming tide of grief.

Nolan takes another step forward, and McPherson’s well-meaning sympathy aside, Alec has given up on trying to predict what Nolan will and won’t do for the time being, doesn’t want to risk it; he catches Nolan when he gets close enough and yanks him to a stop. Nolan struggles against his grip, his fingers digging painfully into Alec’s shoulders, his arms, but Alec doesn’t let go, just wraps one hand around the back of Nolan’s head to hold him still, presses his temple against Nolan’s so that he can speak directly into his ear.

“It’s grief, Nolan,” Alec tells him in a low, fast murmur, tightening his grip when Nolan tries to jerk away, “Nolan, it’s grief. You can’t smell it, but I can. It’s grief.”

There’s no way that Shohreh and her betas can’t hear him as he murmurs to Nolan, but neither she nor anyone else says anything. Alec swallows against the burn of gratitude in his throat and just keeps ahold of Nolan until he stops struggling, until his hands on Alec’s arms stop trying to push him away and instead grip painfully tight, holding Alec to him.

“He died for us,” Nolan suddenly chokes out, and Alec doesn’t know if Nolan is talking to Shohreh or to him or to himself, but then Nolan pulls back some and looks Alec straight in the eyes as he repeats, his breathing coming almost fast enough to be hyperventilation, “He died for us.”

Alec doesn’t know what to say, his whole face twisting with pain as he stares back; he’s helplessly relieved when Shohreh answers instead.

“Then let’s make sure his sacrifice isn’t wasted,” She says simply, and Alec turns some to look at her over his shoulder.

She doesn’t smile, or apologize for her earlier comment, but there’s a look in her eyes that’s almost better, a steely-eyed resolve that reminds Alec, in that moment, of Theo; of how Theo had looked earlier when he’d figured out Monroe’s plan and—looking back, Alec now realizes—had made the decision to get Alec, Mason, and Nolan out safely, no matter the cost. It lights a burn of feeling in Alec’s chest that starts to melt some of the persistent despair that’d frozen around his heart, his lungs.

“Daniel,” Shohreh suddenly says, looking past Alec to McPherson, “Get everyone ready; we leave in an hour for Beacon Hills.” She pauses and looks back at Alec—still stood with his back half-turned to her, Nolan’s fingers digging furrows into his arms—as she adds, as she _promises_ , “We’re ending this farce tonight.”

McPherson jerks a quick nod in acknowledgement and turns on his heel and starts back towards the front door, his phone already in his hand. The other Yreka pack members in the room stand, some of them grabbing jackets as they head for the door, others pulling out their own phones to start making calls. One of them approaches Shohreh and says something quietly to her, then nods at whatever she says back and turns to head past Alec, Nolan, and Mason, all of them standing stock-still, unsure what to do. Alec feels Shohreh’s eyes on him and glances back up at her from where his eyes had drifted helplessly back to Nolan, one hand still tangled in Nolan’s shirt, the other having slipped down from the back of his head to his shoulder.

“You need to eat something, all of you.” She finally says, her gaze running over Nolan and Mason in turn before returning to Alec, “And you need to shower.”

Alec flinches, one hand starting to move back up towards the back of his neck, marked with Theo’s black blood. But Nolan catches it before he can, shakes his head when Alec looks at him in surprise. But all he says is _don’t_ , low and soft; Alec nods after a beat and lets Nolan pull his hand back down, feels his pulse jump when Nolan doesn’t let it go and instead tangles their fingers together.

“Nolan, Mason, come with me,” Shohreh orders, already starting to pivot on her heel towards, presumably, the kitchen, “Alec, the bathroom is the third door on the right down the hallway behind you. I’ll have someone bring you some clean clothes.”

Neither Alec, Nolan, or Mason moves, the flaw in Shohreh’s plan—at least to Alec—immediately coming clear; that same spike of panic from earlier drives through Alec again as he realizes that following Shohreh’s plan will necessitate them splitting up. He finds himself automatically looking at Nolan, then at Mason over his shoulder, to find both of them already looking back at him, their expressions equally reluctant.

“Alec,” Shohreh murmurs, and this time when she says his name it’s gentle; he looks away from Nolan to meet her eyes, feels himself flush some with embarrassment even as he tightens his grip on Nolan, as he deliberately focuses his senses on Mason’s heartbeat a few steps away, “I won’t let them out of my sight.”

As she speaks she blinks her eyes once, and when she opens them again, they’re flared alpha red. But it isn’t a threat, or an order; it’s meant as an oath, a sign of her commitment to what she just promised him, and Alec feels his own eyes flaring in response. Then swallows around his tight throat and nods a few times, blinks his eyes to banish the gold and turns back to Nolan and Mason, lip between his teeth.

“I’ll—I’ll see you guys in a few,” Alec tells them quietly, his hands tightening briefly around Nolan’s shoulder, around his hand still tangled with Alec’s own.

Nolan opens and closes his mouth a few times but ultimately doesn’t say anything, just releases Alec’s hand and the grip he’d still had on Alec’s upper arm and moves away, towards Shohreh. Alec narrowly resists the urge to turn and watch him go, instead smiling slightly at Mason as Mason steps past him; he pauses and puts a hand on Alec’s shoulder, squeezing.

“See you in a few,” Mason confirms softly, and then he moves to join Nolan and Shohreh as they head for the kitchen.

Alec stands in that unfamiliar living room, surrounded by an unfamiliar pack, his ears and nose still fixated on Nolan and Mason—on _his_ pack—for a few moments longer, and then he forces himself towards the third door on the right, down the hallway Shohreh had indicated.

\---

Twenty minutes later, Alec finishes pulling on the clothes that one of Shohreh’s betas had brought him, then stops, caught, when he catches his reflection in the mirror.

He looks awful, if he’s going to be honest about it. It’s not the clothes—though the sleeves of his borrowed shirt hang down past his wrists, and the jeans are just long enough that he can’t help stepping on them—but something else, something harder to pinpoint. Maybe it’s his expression, hunted and wounded and raw, or maybe it’s the still-pink skin of the back of his neck, where he’d spent ten minutes of his fifteen in the shower scrubbing at Theo’s dried black blood.

Alec hesitates briefly, perfectly aware that he’s being insane, neurotic, but after a beat he twists some, pulls down the collar of his shirt so that he can check, make sure the streaks of sickly black are gone. They are—and with them the constant, nauseating smell of Theo’s body slowly shutting down—but even with the back of his neck scrubbed clean, Alec can’t help but press shaking fingers to where the blood had been, can’t help remembering the awful scent or the way that Theo’s fingers had trembled when he’d wrapped them around the back of Alec’s neck in the apartment. Closing his eyes, Alec forces himself to think instead of Nolan telling him _don’t_ , of Nolan pulling his hand away from his neck before tangling their fingers together, and drops his hand.

He steps out of the bathroom—his old, bloodstained clothes left folded on the counter after a few long seconds of not knowing what the hell to do with them—and then starts heading back down the hallway, his senses already stretched out and searching for Nolan and Mason. They’re not hard to find, even under the various smells and sounds of the Yreka pack and its various members, and Alec speeds up some, an anxious twist in his chest to lay eyes back on Nolan and Mason, Shohreh’s promise not to let them out of her sight notwithstanding.

Just as he’s about to exit the hallway back into the living room, he jumps and barely manages to bite back a surprised yelp when his phone—which he’d all but forgotten he’d transferred to his borrowed pants—starts to vibrate against his leg. He stops, the anxious twist in his chest cracking open into full-blown fear as he fumbles his phone out of his pocket and sees Scott’s name on the display, as his mind starts racing with thoughts of what Scott might have to say: that they found Theo’s body, bullet-ridden and bloody and left to rot in the parking lot; that they _didn’t_ find Theo’s body, and might never, Monroe and her hunters claiming it for whatever twisted reason.

That someone else from the pack is hurt, or dead, or dying.

Noise in front of him catches his attention and he glances up at Nolan and Mason as they stumble to a graceless halt in his line of sight, their faces reflecting his own terror; Shohreh must have heard Alec’s phone vibrate or smelled his sudden anxiety or both, and said something. As he stares at Nolan and Mason, Shohreh steps back into the living room behind them, her expression much more controlled.

Underneath it, though, Alec thinks he sees worry, and a heartsick sort of exhaustion; he knows that for all their many and passionate disagreements, Shohreh likes Scott, and the rest of the McCall pack by extension. Theo has— _had_ —a theory, something about how Shohreh doesn’t believe in Scott’s rose-tinted view of the world but desperately _wants_ to, and as Alec looks at her, he wonders if she’s mourning more than just Theo’s death; if she’s resigning herself to burying that vision right along with Theo.

The phone in his hands stops vibrating and Alec jerks, refocuses on it.

“Shit,” He mutters and immediately moves to unlock it, tapping Scott’s name to call him back.

The phone barely manages one ring before Scott answers, “Alec?”

“Yeah, Scott. It’s me, sorry, I—” Alec starts, but Scott cuts him off.

“Alec, listen to me.” He orders without preamble, and Alec finds his mouth snapping shut, his spine straightening; he wonders, absently, if Scott even realizes he’s putting alpha force behind his words, “Theo is alive.”

Whatever idle thoughts Alec had been thinking—half to push off the frantic worries racing through his head, half a mindless sort of self-defense—drop away immediately, replaced by a loud sort of white noise that buzzes through Alec’s skull. Alec finds himself staring wide-eyed and unseeing at Nolan and Mason, realizes in an absent sort of way that his breath has started to come in short, shallow pants.

“...what?” He finally manages.

“Theo is alive,” Scott repeats forcefully, “We found him—”

But this time it’s Alec who cuts off Scott, something desperate solidifying in his chest, almost painful in its urgency, “That’s not possible. That’s not _possible_. Theo can’t be alive. Scott, you weren’t there, he’d been _shot_ four times. The bullets were poisoned. He _couldn’t_ —”

“She must have healed him,” Scott interrupts; he doesn’t specify who ‘she’ is, but then again, Alec doesn’t need him to, “We saw the bullet holes in his clothes, but the wounds were gone.” Scott pauses for a half-beat, Alec’s mouth already half-open as he prepares to protest again; in front of him, Nolan and Mason are trading wide-eyed glances, Mason’s mouth moving: _Theo is alive…?_ “Look, Alec. He’s alive, but he’s in…” Scott’s voice breaks and Alec can hear him swallow before he starts again, “He’s in really bad shape, she was in the middle of interrogating him when we found him. We’re at the hospital now and my mom and Liam’s dad are treating him, he’s improving, but we don’t know—”

Scott keeps talking, but Alec doesn’t hear a word. Every muscle in his body suddenly feels watery, his legs trembling, and Alec stumbles against the hallway wall, manages to get his back to it so that he can slide bonelessly down to a sitting position, his legs splayed out haphazardly in front of him. _Theo is alive_. But Theo couldn’t have been alive by the time Scott and the others would have been able to reach Beacon Hills, to find him. _Theo is alive_. He’d already been all but dead when he’d grabbed Alec in the apartment and made Alec swear to leave him behind. _Theo is alive_. If Theo had still been alive by the time Scott and the others had gotten to him, then Alec had left him in the parking lot not to buy Alec’s, Mason’s, and Nolan’s safety with his death, but to be captured and tortured by Monroe and her psychotic followers.

_Oh my god_ , Alec thinks blankly.

He doesn’t realize that his vision had been starting to tunnel, his hearing starting to dim, until Nolan and Mason suddenly drop to their knees in front of him, their hands reaching out to touch his arms, the sides of his bent legs. Their expressions are frantic, panicked, and Alec is hit with the knee-jerk urge to reach out, comfort them, but then he hears Scott’s voice in his head again— _Theo is alive_ —and he curls into himself, a wounded, animal sound tearing loose from his throat. He barely hears it when Shohreh snaps _move_ , barely registers it when Mason and Nolan shuffle sideways to make room for Shohreh to kneel down in front of him as well, too focused on the feeling of his ribcage cracking open with the pain of his new knowledge— _Theo is alive_ —and it’s necessary corollary; that Theo was alive, and was capable of being healed and saved, when Alec had left him behind.

But then he feels his phone—which he’d still been absently clutching, the hand holding it lying bonelessly on the floor next to him—get ripped out of his hand. Jolted back to himself some, he looks up at Shohreh in time to see her bring the phone up to her mouth.

“McCall, shut up for a second,” She orders, and then shoves the phone at Mason, who takes it and after a moment starts talking to Scott, Nolan looking up at Mason to stare at him intently, his hand clenching on Alec’s leg. Then she reaches forward and grabs Alec’s face between her hands, forces him to meet her eyes from where he’d found his gaze tracking his phone as she’d handed it over, “Alec, look at me.”

Alec does, and almost immediately words start pouring out of him like Shohreh has accused him of something, “Theo is alive, Monroe healed his wolfsbane poisoning,” He confesses to her, and can feel the exact moment that he loses control of the shift, his eyes flaring and his claws and fangs lengthening as he says, “I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t know. I thought he was too sick. I didn’t mean to leave him behind like that. I didn’t _mean to_ —”

“ _Alec_ ,” Shohreh snaps, and shakes him none-too-gently; Alec cuts himself off abruptly, though all it means is that the desperate words start to pile up behind his teeth, start to fill up his throat and choke him instead, “How many times had Theo been shot with those poisoned bullets by the time you were escaping?” When Alec doesn’t answer her immediately, Shohreh shakes him again, “ _Alec._ ”

“Four,” Alec blurts out, his hands coming to grab her wrists defensively; his claws almost immediately open thin, shallow cuts in Shohreh’s skin, but she doesn’t so much as flinch, “Four times.”

“Did Theo think he was going to die?” She demands.

“Yes,” Alec answers, remembering the knowing look in Theo’s eyes in the stairwell, in the apartment; beside him, Mason pauses in talking to Scott to look at him, horrified.

“And how many hunters were there when you were escaping?” Shohreh continues relentlessly.

“I don’t know,” Alec replies, and winces when Shohreh’s grip tightens, “I don’t—”

“Over a dozen,” Mason offers quietly, the phone briefly tilted away from his mouth so that he can answer, “There were over a dozen.”

“So what would have happened—” Shohreh pauses and shakes him again, perhaps noticing that his attention had flicked helplessly to Mason when he spoke, “ _Alec_. What would have happened if you’d gone back for him?”

Alec refocuses on her, meets her eyes again—flared red, now, and burning bright—and lets himself see again the parking lot and the hunters, the slick gleam of their rifles, lets himself feel the heat and force of the bullet that had slammed into the truck’s door just inches from his arm when he’d been trying to convince Theo to make a run for it. _What would have happened if you’d gone back for him?_

“We would have been captured,” Alec finds himself saying, and knows it’s true the instant he says it, “They would have taken us.”

Shohreh nods once, a blunt agreement, then twists the knife, “And if they’d had you, would Theo have been any good to them?”

Alec stares at her, not wanting to answer; there had been something painfully, blissfully cathartic about letting himself spiral into self-loathing, something almost euphoric in pinning all the blame for Theo’s capture and subsequent torture— _she was in the middle of questioning him when we found him; he’s in really bad shape_ —on himself. But he knows the truth, had always _known_ the truth.

“No,” Alec finally admits, “No. If they’d had us, they wouldn’t have needed him. He was too much of a risk, one of the hunters already said. They would have...they would have let him die.”

Shohreh’s expression softens then, and she releases the sides of his head so that she can cup his face gently, stroke her thumbs over his cheekbones, “So did you do the right thing, when you did as Theo asked and left him behind?”

Alec can’t answer immediately, his throat closing up and his eyes starting to burn. But Shohreh doesn’t push him, just continues the sweeping movements of her thumbs across his face. The red in her eyes is still there, but the power behind it feels banked low, now—the comfort of a campfire on a cold night, a light in the darkness—rather than a forest fire, raging.

“Yes,” Alec finally whispers, then again, more strongly, “ _Yes_ , I did the right thing.”

Saying it is like expelling some kind of poison, and he can feel the muscles in his neck go loose, the only thing keeping his head up Shohreh’s hands on his face. Shohreh keeps hold of him for a few long seconds more, and then she slowly takes her hands back; Alec lets his head fall back against the wall as she releases him and lets his grip on her wrists drop, his hands—his nails once more human, the shift fading along with his flared eyes and fangs—falling into his lap. But they don’t stay there: the second Shohreh stands and steps back slightly, Nolan and Mason surge forward into him and Alec finds his arms wrapping around them automatically, pulling them in close without conscious thought. Mason winds up half-buried under his arm, Alec’s phone forgotten on the ground beside him. Nolan burrows into his other side, his forehead pressed hard against Alec’s temple.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Nolan tells him immediately, words quick and his voice cracking a little, “It _wasn’t_. I’m sorry I said it would be earlier, I didn’t mean it.”

Alec turns his head harder into the press of Nolan’s forehead, tightens his grip around both him and Mason and closes his eyes. He doesn’t say anything, but the close press of Nolan and Mason to him, the warmth of their bodies and the comforting scent of them, even layered as it is under fear-sweat and interrupted grief, is like a balm, soothing the ragged edges of his thoughts, his splintered emotions. He only opens them again when he hears a small sound in front of him, sees Shohreh bend to pick up Alec’s abandoned phone.

“Scott?” She questions; he must answer in the affirmative, because she continues, turning some to either give them or herself some privacy, “Tell me what happened.”

If Alec focused his hearing, he could catch what Scott says, hear how he responds to Shohreh’s methodical and slightly impatient interrogation. Instead he concentrates on the sounds and smells of Nolan and Mason wrapped around him, who he is wrapped around in turn. Above him, Shohreh keeps talking to Scott; every now and then she barks out an order for him to stop, makes him repeat things, over and over. Alec’s heartbeat has settled back down and the edges of himself—torn open and scrapped raw by his earlier, whirlwind bout of self-blame—have begun to feel smoothed back down by the time Shohreh seems to decide she’s satisfied with her conversation with Scott.

“I’m going to put you on speaker,” She informs him, then takes the phone from her ear and taps it, holds it out so that its hovering between her and the confused pile of limbs, hair, and bodies that Alec, Nolan, and Mason have become, “Okay. Tell them.”

Alec lets his head rest against Nolan’s, curls his fingers in the fabric of Mason’s shirt, as he listens to Scott talk. Scott tells them about going back for Theo, about following the hunters who’d given up on finding the truck—Alec feels his lips curl in a brief, savage grin, while beside him Mason and Nolan both make small, satisfied noises—to the warehouse where they’d found Theo and Monroe. Alec sucks in a sharp breath when Scott tells him about Monroe’s death—about Liam’s merciless retribution—and the knowledge kindles a burn of satisfaction in his chest. It immediately dims, though, when Scott explains what Monroe did to Theo, the mistletoe capsule that she’d made him swallow.

He doesn’t sugarcoat it: Scott and the others don’t know that Scott’s mom and Liam’s dad can save Theo, and no one quite knows the odds. Alec can hear the desperate hope battling with a pragmatic sort of realism in Scott’s voice, and his chest does constrict, some of his earlier fear returning. But _dying_ —dying is better than dead. And _improving_ …

Improving is better than both.

Alec finds himself looking to Nolan, then to Mason, as Scott explains Theo’s condition, the rest of the pack’s poorly hidden fear of his chances of recovery, and sees his own thoughts reflected on both of their faces.

“Watch,” Nolan suddenly says, too quietly to really interrupt Scott’s flow, meant more for Alec and Mason huddled closely next to him, “He’s gonna make it purely out of spite.”

Alec can’t help the quiet, huffing sound that escapes him, tightening his arm around Mason automatically when Mason buries his face briefly in Alec’s shoulder as he shakes with silent laughter. Nolan grins at Alec, his eyes crinkling, and Alec can’t help it; he turns his head so that his forehead is against Nolan’s, closes his eyes when Nolan leans into the touch.

“Yeah,” Alec agrees after a beat, “Yeah, I bet you’re right.”

He’s so focused on the feeling of Nolan close enough that they’re sharing breath that he almost doesn’t hear it when Shohreh informs Scott dryly, “They’re not listening to you anymore.”

Alec looks up when he hears Scott say _oh, uh_ , clearly thrown. When he meets Shohreh’s eyes she’s smiling softly down at them, her relief maybe not as obvious, but there; maybe she wouldn’t have to bury her quiet hope that Scott’s vision of the world could win the day after all.

“Tell Scott you’ll head back to Beacon Hills soon so that I can stop holding this silly device,” Shohreh orders Alec, not unkindly; she waggles the phone demonstratively.

“Uh, right,” Alec says, then, “Scott, we’ll—we’ll be back soon, okay?”

“Okay, Alec,” Scott agrees, sounding relieved even through the crap quality of the call; Alec wonders if he feels the absence of three members of his pack like a wound, “We’ll see you soon.”

Shohreh hangs up the phone and holds it out to Alec, who reluctantly frees the arm he’d had around Mason to take it. Mason sags back against the wall, pulling his legs up so that he’s mirroring Alec’s posture; his scent is a confusing tangle of disbelief and raw joy and exhaustion, but when he tips his head back to look at Alec, he’s grinning. Nolan—who’d shifted enough to allow Alec to retrieve his phone but had stayed close—just settles back on his heels, one hand still clenched in the back of Alec’s shirt, the other around Alec’s knee; Alec’s head is too much of a mess to overthink it, and so instead of spiraling into several frantic, branching thoughts about what Nolan’s recent behavior might mean, he leans back into Nolan’s hold and tightens his own grip in the fabric of his hoodie.

Shohreh watches them for a few seconds longer, a small smile playing at the edges of her mouth, and then she sighs and puts her hands on her hips, “Well. That was an exciting few hours.”

Alec snorts, and the smile on Shohreh’s face finishes breaking through. Then her expression sobers some and she studies Alec’s face, flicks her eyes over Mason pressed up against his side, over Nolan gripping him and Alec gripping him in turn. There’s a complicated note to her scent that Alec can’t untangle—absently he thinks _Theo could_ , and the thought sets off a new flare of raw feeling in his chest because Theo is alive, so he _really could_ —but he focuses on the overriding sense of satisfaction she’s giving off and lets the rest go.

Shohreh can either smell or has the good sense to guess what he’s thinking, because she meets his eyes once more and says softly, “So Theo is alive then.”

And Alec thinks of earlier, of Shohreh bluntly stating _so Theo is dead then_ , her hand on the back of his neck and her eyes on the poisoned blood Alec hadn’t known he’d been carrying around like some kind of grieving mark. So Alec tilts his head back against the wall so he can look at her more fully. He tightens his grip on Nolan and shifts one of his hands so that he can briefly squeeze Mason’s knee knocking against his own, looks at each of them in turn and then returns his gaze to Shohreh.

“Yeah,” Alec agrees quietly, voice hoarse but content, “Looks like he is.”

\---

Ten hours later, Alec pauses outside of his front door—Malia having just dropped him off from an hour spent running around the Preserve after Ms. McCall had threatened to turn him into a throw pillow and Scott had kicked him out of the hospital for his own good—and turns his head towards Theo’s apartment, caught by the steady, strong sound of Theo’s heartbeat _thump-thumping_ away in sleep. Closing his eyes and ignoring the carnage of the still-mangled elevator doors at the end of the hallway, desperately grateful that someone—Derek or Scott, maybe?—had cleaned up Theo’s blood, the sickly stench of it replaced with the chemical sting of industrial cleaner, Alec leans his forehead against the cool metal of his door, takes a moment to concentrate on the sound, and just breathes.

The hospital had been harder than he’d anticipated. They’d left Shohreh’s buoyed by the knowledge that Theo was alive—and with strict instructions to inform him that he’s now on the hook for remedial lessons in how not to be, quote, a ‘fucking strategic catastrophe’—and Mason and Nolan had been that wide-eyed, manic sort of exhausted that surpassed actual tiredness and went straight to wired. Alec had listened to them chatter the whole way back to Beacon Hills, the scent of their relief and raw joy filling up the cab of the truck, Alec taking deep drags of it and feeling more and more grounded with every mile closer they got to the hospital, to the rest of the pack and to seeing Theo manifestly _not dead;_ maybe Scott and the others had their reservations, but Alec, he’d _known_ —somewhere deep in the heart of himself—that Theo would pull through, if only to refuse Monroe and her genocidal followers the satisfaction of having killed him.

But setting foot inside the lobby of the hospital, Alec had been overwhelmed by the smell of sickness, of death, and Alec had faltered. He’d searched out Theo’s scent as a sort of automatic self-defense, trying to push it back, and while he’d found it, it’d been weaker than he’d anticipated, still ravaged by poison. It hadn’t helped that outside of the truck cab—just like at Shohreh’s—he’d lost his ability to focus on Nolan’s and Mason’s scents to the exclusion of all others, hadn’t been able to fully wrap himself in them as a bulwark against the rest of the world battering at his senses. He’d done his best to keep them in sight—which they seemed more than willing to assist with, never more than a few feet from him, their own anxiety clearly cranked back up—but it’d been a flimsy bandage over the suddenly-reopened wound of the earlier attack.

And Liam’s _arms_ …

Whatever relief Alec had felt at being back with the McCall pack—at seeing Scott wrap Nolan in a tight, protective embrace, at seeing Corey getting ahold of Mason and the way that Mason’s whole body had immediately seemed to go loose in response—had been nearly eradicated by the sight and, more devastatingly, the _smell_ of Liam’s arms covered fingertips-to-elbows in Theo’s poisoned black blood. Even dulled as it’d been by the passage of a few hours, even muted as it was underneath the living, breathing scent of Theo just a few yards away, Alec had found himself helplessly staring at it, feeling himself back in that stairwell, in the apartment, with Theo ordering Alec to leave him to die, his body slowly shutting down.

Lydia’s brusque clean-up had helped, as had Nolan’s tentative outreach. Alec had nearly bowed from the force of his relief when Nolan had reached out a hand, had let Alec pull him into a bruising hug; he hadn’t been sure he’d get to have any of that, back in Beacon Hills with the rest of the pack and the danger—mostly—passed. And then, seeing Theo—even hooked up to numerous machines, an oxygen mask over his face and Ms. McCall and Dr. Geyer working calmly but resolutely around him—had cracked the last of his spiraling thoughts, let him breathe past his remembered terror and grief.

But even then Alec couldn’t get his better sense to override the lizard-brain insistence of his instincts, still raw, still worn-out and worn-down and wrecked. He’d had to sit in the uncomfortable hospital chairs with the others just waiting, waiting, and while the five warm points of pressure that Nolan’s fingertips had created against the back of his hand—their fingers tangled together and Nolan’s shoulder pressed firmly against his—had grounded him, there was only so much any of it could do in the absence of Theo opening his eyes to look at them all, of Theo getting up out of the hospital bed.

Even after Ms. McCall and Dr. Geyer had come out to announce that Theo would pull through—that diamond-hard knot of certainty in Alec’s chest flaring open into a full-body burn as they’d spoken—Alec still hadn’t been able to pull himself away. He’d been practically asleep on his feet, he’d been half-sick from the thought of letting Mason and Nolan out of his sight, safe with the rest of the pack as they were, but he hadn’t been able to leave the hospital. So he’d sent Mason and Nolan home with Corey and Theo’s truck, had taken his place next to Liam and Scott in the waiting room, the three of them sitting in an exhausted sort of stupor, a ragtag honor guard.

It hadn’t lasted, of course. Liam’s ire had started to increase in direct proportion to Theo’s improvement, his disrupted grief burning away to be replaced by an insulted sort of fury; how _dare_ Theo nearly get himself killed before they managed to figure out their ridiculous relationship? Or so Alec had chosen to interpret Liam’s steadily hotter scent and restless movements, Scott beside him looking resigned and a little helplessly amused as Liam’s uncharacteristic stillness had finally splintered and he’d started harassing his father, determined to find out the exact second he could start carving his pound of flesh out of Theo’s self-sacrificing hide.

Alec had taken advantage of the resulting argument and Scott’s half-hearted and entirely ineffective effort to referee to slip back into Theo’s room, a feeling like a magnet drawing him back to Theo’s bedside. Without the oxygen mask and with his body mostly free of the dissolved mistletoe, Theo had looked and smelled infinitely better, and Alec had found himself collapsing bonelessly into the chair by Theo’s bed, his limbs shaky with his relief.

But as understanding as Ms. McCall and Dr. Geyer had been, they’d eventually lost patience with both Liam’s continued and relentless campaign to get a medical professional’s approval to start in on Theo and Alec’s increasingly creative attempts to both stay close to Theo and out of their way. Just as dawn had started breaking through the cloud cover outside the window of Theo’s room, Scott had taken one look at the expression of exaggerated patience on his mother’s face, at the slightly manic, exhausted gleam in Liam’s father's eyes, and had called Malia and Derek to come retrieve Alec and Liam respectively.

It’d been a good decision, Alec can admit; he’s sweaty and his borrowed clothes are covered in dirt and dead leaves, but the tightly-winched feeling in his chest is mostly gone, replaced with a clean sort of hollowness, like the sharp air of the Preserve and the burn of his muscles had scooped the last of his despair and fear out of him. Centering himself in the middle of that newly cleared space, Alec inhales one final, deep drag of Theo’s weakened-but-steadily-healing scent and blows it out, then straightens and rolls open his door.

He’s still half-focused on the muted sound of Theo’s heartbeat, the other half of his head scattered mindlessly around to other thoughts—how bone-deep _tired_ he is, how Mason and Nolan are doing, whether Derek has done something dramatic in response to Liam’s continuously and spontaneously combusting temper—that he completely misses the heartbeat beating steadily from his own couch. Or he misses it right up until the point that Nolan rockets to his feet, looking startled—having been lost in his own thoughts, too, maybe—and more than a little caught.

Alec jumps in response and fumbles his attempt to close the door behind him, his fingers getting caught in the handle and making him yelp at the sudden pain, more surprised than actually hurt. He glances at Nolan over his shoulder, awkwardly twisted as he is as a result, his mouth opening and closing a few times before he colors and turns to the door to focus on freeing himself. He gets his fingers unstuck and turns back to Nolan, who’s wearing a hangdog expression and shifting some from foot to foot.

“We, um,” Nolan starts before Alec can speak, clearly trying to sound breezy but instead sounding nervous and entirely unsure, “We forgot to lock your door when we were fleeing for our lives earlier, so…”

“Oh,” Alec says idiotically in response, his mind mostly an unhelpful blank, “Right.”

Nolan darts a look up at him and then drops his gaze back down to his shoes. Alec desperately casts around for something to say, or do—offer Nolan a drink, maybe? Ask him if managed to sleep at all since the last time Alec saw him?—but everything he can think of seems asinine and stupid. What he wants to ask— _what are you doing here_ —gets caught in his throat, Alec immediately and overwhelmingly terrified to say it, suddenly sure that if he does Nolan will come to his senses and say _nothing_ , will make some excuse and leave.

He finds himself automatically reaching out with his senses to fill the silence, his ears straining to catch the quick staccato tempo of Nolan’s pulse and his nose trying to peel apart his scent. But the second Alec realizes he’s doing it he stops, shoves the revealed information teasing at his conscious mind away; whatever Nolan is doing here, Alec decides that it’s his to choose to share, or not.

Bracing himself—though for _what_ , he has no idea—Alec pastes on what he hopes is a convincing, encouraging smile and gently prompts, “Nolan?”

“I wanted to say I’m sorry,” Nolan suddenly blurts out in response, speaking in such a furious rush that Alec actually has to stop and replay the words in his head before he’s fully able to comprehend them.

He goes to open his mouth, about to say _you have nothing to apologize for_ , when Nolan’s expression suddenly tightens and he glares at Alec like he can see what he’s thinking.

“ _Don’t_ say I don’t have to be sorry, or whatever,” Nolan orders him fiercely, “I should be. I—I am.”

Alec stares at him, thrown. He’s not actually sure what Nolan is trying to apologize _for_ , though he has a few guesses, but just as Alec is one-hundred percent certain that Nolan really _doesn’t_ need to apologize to him, he’s also equally certain that Nolan’s need to apologize ultimately has very little—if anything—to do with Alec himself.

“Okay,” Alec answers finally, softly, “I won’t.”

Nolan glowers at him for a second longer like he thinks Alec is trying to pull something, maybe, and then he glances away, out the loft’s gigantic windows. He brings his arms up from where they’d been dangling loosely by his sides and crosses them tightly over his chest, his shoulders hunching some. Alec’s still standing awkwardly just inside his door and he wonders if he should move, come inside, maybe join Nolan on the other side of the couch so that it’s not acting as some kind of barrier between them, but ultimately he stays put; this is Nolan’s show, his confession, and Alec can wait to figure out how to give him whatever it is he needs, whatever he came here looking for.

When Nolan finally does speak again, it’s a handful of syrupy minutes later, and he won’t look at Alec, “I was one of Monroe’s followers, before,” He stumbles over the word _followers_ , like he’d maybe wanted to use a different one: _disciples_ , or _adherents_ , or _true believers_ , “I nearly—I nearly killed Liam one time because she ordered me too.”

Alec doesn’t say _I know_ , though he does; Theo had filled Alec in on some of the less well-known context of the McCall pack’s well-justified enmity for Monroe over the course of a diner breakfast one day before he’d dragged Alec along on a patrol. It’d been like hearing something that had happened on another _planet_ , the thought of it so impossible to reconcile with the Nolan that he knows. But clearly it had happened on this planet, to Nolan stood in front of him confessing it to him, his scent gone sour and hot with shame, obvious and overwhelming even without Alec actively trying to read it.

“That was the first time Theo saved my life,” Nolan adds, almost musingly. Then his gaze sharpens and he finally meets Alec’s eyes, his expression cracked open and raw, “Today— _yesterday_ —that was the third time.”

_Oh_ , Alec thinks. He’d never really done the math—he’d known of each instance in isolation, but he hadn’t had to _live_ each situation like the other members of the McCall pack—but he realizes it’s true; the zoo, Rossler and Preston, and yesterday makes three. And clearly that knowledge sits heavily on Nolan’s shoulders in and of itself, Alec can see the way it weighs him down, but Alec doesn’t think it’s the only—or even the primary—fact eating at him.

Nolan tears his gaze away from Alec again, back out towards the windows, though Alec is willing to bet he isn’t seeing Beacon Hills half-muted in gray fog, “Joining Monroe, the things I did… After I—after I betrayed her, after Scott killed the Anuk-ite...I told myself that it hadn’t really been _me_. That if it wasn’t for the fear it spread, I never would have...I wasn’t that kind of...I blamed it all on the Anuk-ite. But it was me. It _was._ ”

He stops, his shoulders heaving, and Alec wonders how long he’s swallowed all this down, how long it’s sat in his gut like a tumor, poisoning him. He starts to take a step towards Nolan but then freezes when Nolan suddenly speaks again.

“I used to have these nightmares,” Nolan tells him quietly, his gaze now dropped sightlessly down to the floor, “After the Beast. I’d be back in the library with the other kids, helpless, watching Scott and the others try and fail to stop it. I’d wake up some nights so terrified that I’d just spend the rest of the night praying for the dawn, sure that any second the Beast or _something_ —something else drawn by this crazy town—would come.”

He pauses, looks at Alec, his expression somehow pleading, though Alec doesn’t know for what.

“After a while...after a while I couldn’t help but think of all of them as the same,” Nolan confesses, “By the time Monroe started her crusade, to me every supernatural was a born killer. Every werewolf was the Beast.”

Alec flinches, his heart twisting painfully in his chest: _every werewolf was the Beast_.

Nolan must catch the look on his face because his expression spasms and he shakes his head frantically, “No, Alec, that’s not—”

Then he makes a frustrated noise and comes around the couch—nearly stumbling in his haste—and hurries forward until he can push himself into Alec’s space, get his hands around Alec’s face. He’s got enough momentum that it essentially carries him _through_ Alec, and Alec staggers back into the door, his hands flying to Nolan’s wait to help steady him. Nolan follows him automatically, determination and pleading written all over his face. Alec’s hands on Nolan’s waist briefly tighten, but before he can decide what to do with them—drop them? Leave them where they are?—Nolan starts speaking again.

“I nearly got Scott and the others killed, over and over again,” Nolan explains in a low, quick rush, “I told myself they were monsters, that I was just protecting myself, protecting everyone else _from_ them. But I was _wrong_ , Alec. I was so wrong.”

He stops and jerks his gaze away from Alec’s, like he can’t meet Alec’s wide-eyed, speechless stare anymore.

“I treated them all like something other than human. For a while I truly believed that they weren’t, they deserved…” He hesitates, clearly trying to put the rest of it into words, “And they’ve never...they’ve never…” Nolan trails off, frustration soaked through every syllable.

Nolan can’t seem to find the words to explain, but Alec thinks he understands anyway. He thinks, unbidden, of Theo, of the way he always seems to be on the verge of tearing himself in half, helplessly straining towards the McCall pack and the place they’ve offered him—affirmatively or not—and yet simultaneously forcing himself back, away.

Alec thinks of Theo, who for as long as Alec has known him has always seemed determined to punish himself, since no one in the McCall pack is willing to do it for him.

_They’ve never blamed you for it_ , Alec fills in silently, but doesn’t say; it’s not his place, and it’s clear that Nolan already _knows_. Nolan looks back at him finally and his mouth twists, his brow furrows helplessly.

“What am I supposed to do with that?” Nolan demands, his hands dropping from Alec’s face to his shoulders, sounding lost, a little childishly confused, “I don’t...what am I supposed to do?”

Alec lets Nolan search his eyes, his face, and has no idea what he’s seeing there. He doesn’t know what Nolan’s hoping to hear, but he knows what he wants to _say_ , what he wants to do, and so he carefully brings his hands up from Nolan’s waist until he can cup them around the back of his neck, until he can slowly tip Nolan’s forehead against his own, just like he’d done earlier at Shohreh’s, like Theo had done to him in the apartment.

“You should let them forgive you,” Alec tells Nolan softly, sincerely, and tightens his grip on the back of Nolan’s neck when he makes a pained sound and jerks, “You should—you should forgive yourself.”

Alec had closed his eyes when he’d moved—brave enough to risk Nolan stepping away but not brave enough to risk seeing the look in his eyes as he’s spoken—but now he opens them, catches Nolan’s gaze. He looks stricken, his mouth dropped slightly open and his brows pulled hard together, but before Alec can decide what his expression means, Nolan suddenly surges forward into him and slots their mouths together. Stunned, it takes Alec a few seconds to respond; long enough, in fact, that Nolan starts to pull away.

“No, wait,” Alec blurts out frantically, chasing him, “Don’t—”

And that seems to be all the reassurance Nolan needs; he catches Alec’s eyes for a half-second and then pushes back into him, Alec stumbling back once more against the door at the pressure. This time when he feels Nolan’s mouth on his own Alec tilts his head, slides one hand up from the back of Nolan’s neck to the base of his skull and holds him there as he opens his mouth, lets Nolan lick inside. Alec moans at the first touch of Nolan’s tongue and meets it with his own, his mind whirling with a thousand thoughts at once: wondering how the hell they’d gotten here; trying desperately to focus on the slick stroke of Nolan’s tongue against his own; overwhelmed by the feeling of Nolan pressed thigh to chest with him all at once.

But then Alec has to yank himself away, his head colliding painfully with the brick wall behind him as he desperately gulps down air and his hands fly away from Nolan to smack one each into the solid metal of the door and the rough brick of the wall.

“Sorry, sorry,” He pants, squeezing his flared eyes shut.

He can feel his fangs pressing insistently against the inside of his lips, his mouth still tingling from the burn of Nolan’s against his own, his tongue still coated with Nolan’s taste. The back of his left hand stings; he’d slammed his suddenly-clawed hands back hard enough from Nolan that he’d open up several minor cuts when it’d hit the brick. Frustrated, he turns his hands so that he has his palms to the wall and then clenches his fingers; the sound his claws make as they scrape along the metal and brick seems thunderously loud in the sudden silence of the apartment, broken only by his and Nolan’s harsh breathing.

“Sorry,” He says again miserably, and slowly opens his still-flared eyes.

He’s expecting to see fear on Nolan’s face, or at the very least irritation, but what he sees is something else. Nolan’s hair is already a mess from Alec’s hands and his lips are already red from Alec’s mouth, his cheeks flushed with arousal, and he looks...fascinated; Alec can’t think of any other word for how Nolan looks but _fascinated_. As Alec watches Nolan slowly shakes his head and then brings one hand up from where his hands had twisted themselves into Alec’s collar while they’d kissed, and he touches gentle, careful fingertips to the thin skin under Alec’s right eye, traces them from one corner to the other.

“Don’t be sorry,” Nolan says finally, softly, “Don’t be. It's—it’s who you are. You shouldn’t ever be sorry for that.”

There’s a whole ocean’s worth of meaning lurking just under that quiet, firm assertion, but Alec doesn’t have time to overthink it; Nolan slowly slides his fingers down from just underneath Alec’s eye to his mouth, uses them to pull Alec’s bottom lip slightly down. His breath kicking back up from where it’d started to slow, his pulse once more starting to race, Alec lets Nolan gently encourage his jaw open, lets him reveal his still-shifted fangs. He finds himself holding his breath as Nolan trails his fingers back up, as he slowly, slowly, touches the tips to the sharp edges of Alec’s teeth, as he runs them carefully back along the deadly points. Alec’s eyes flutter closed and he bites back a whimper, the feeling of Nolan’s achingly vulnerable fingers against his fangs somehow even more fiercely arousing than the feeling of Nolan’s half-hard cock pressed against his own.

But that feeling has _nothing_ on the sudden blaze of arousal that sears through Alec when Nolan suddenly removes his fingers and replaces them with the tip of his tongue. Alec’s eyes snap open and he gasps, his still-shifted claws _screeching_ as his hands clench against the wall behind him. Nolan flows with him when Alec jerks helplessly, brings both hands back up to Alec’s face so that he can hold it steady as he traces his tongue delicately over the sharp edges of Alec’s fangs. Chest heaving and cock now fully hard against Nolan’s stomach, Alec holds himself desperately still, terrified of moving and hurting Nolan and yet so, so painfully turned on.

Nolan finishes tracing each of Alec’s fangs with his tongue and pulls back some, Alec only half-succeeding at biting back a disappointed whine; he looks Alec straight in the eye and then orders, “Don’t ever be sorry for what you are.”

Alec stares at him, wide-eyed, his body a total mess of arousal and heart-bursting gratitude and not a little fear—Nolan’s unexpected acceptance aside, he’s still achingly human and Alec is manifestly not in control of his shift—and then he can’t help it; he bends his wrists back so that his claws are out of the way and brings his arms forward so that he can wrap them around Nolan’s back, pull him in as best he can. Nolan groans and lets him, doesn’t seem fazed by Alec’s awkward hold, just lets Alec take control of the kiss, Alec’s tongue in Nolan’s mouth this time to avoid the worst of the danger from Alec’s fangs. Even still Alec ends up opening several shallow, instantly-healing cuts on his own tongue as he kisses Nolan—Nolan making a small noise as he tastes the first hint of blood—but he doesn’t pull back, just tightens his hold around Alec’s face and leans more heavily against him.

It brings their hips into even firmer contact and Alec gasps at the surge of arousal it sends through him, winds up swallowing Nolan’s breathy moan. His clawed fingers spasm in mid-air, his bent wrists still pressed firmly to Nolan’s back. He can’t fully bite back the frustrated whine that tries to leave his throat, frustrated by his inability to get his hands around Nolan’s hips, the curve of his ribs.

“It’s okay,” Nolan pulls back some so he can murmur soothingly against Alec’s mouth, “It’s okay, Alec.”

As he speaks he drops his hands from Alec’s face, gets Alec’s shirt pulled up enough that he can fumble with the button of Alec’s borrowed jeans, get the zipper yanked down. Gasping, Alec drops his head back against the wall and squeezes his still-flared eyes shut, bucks his hips forward into the press of Nolan’s palm when Nolan slides his hand in between the splayed-open sides of Alec’s jeans and cups his aching cock; whichever one of Shohreh’s betas has sacrificed an outfit to Alec hadn’t provided underwear, which Alec hadn’t blamed them for then and _certainly_ isn’t complaining about now. Nolan presses his lips to the side of Alec’s mouth as he starts to move his hand, clearly looking for a kiss, but as much as Alec wants to he knows there’s no way he can focus enough to keep Nolan out of danger from his fangs, now with how completely, entirely overwhelmed he is by the feeling of Nolan’s hand wrapped tightly around cock.

Instead Alec turns his head so that he can press hard, closed-mouthed kisses to Nolan’s jaw, mumbling, “I can’t, not with—”

But Nolan just grins—Alec can feel it against his cheek—and works his hand faster, “That’s kind of hot.”

Alec groans, “You’re going to kill me.”

Nolan just laughs and adds some kind of twist to his upstroke, Alec’s hips bucking. His hands—still clawed, still with his wrists bent back and digging as firmly as they can into Nolan’s back—clench around empty air, and Alec whimpers and noses at Nolan’s jaw, the pleasure in his gut winching tighter and tighter.

“Nolan, I’m gonna—” Alec warns him breathily, and then a confused noise leaves him in a punched-out rush when Nolan’s only response is to suddenly push back, one hand splayed on Alec’s chest to hold him in place against the wall, the other still working him.

But Nolan just says, “Your eyes, Alec. I want to see—”

Alec stares at him, his mouth dropped open from a combination of his quickly-building climax and a shocked, unexpected sort of heat at Nolan’s request. He can feel that his eyes are still flared, and Nolan’s hand clenches in his shirt, tightens around his cock as he catches them, and that’s it, that’s all it takes; Alec slams his head back against the back of the wall as he comes. But somehow—miraculously—he manages to keep eyes open, lets Nolan drink in the steady burn of the gold as he so clearly wants to.

Alec sags panting back against the wall as the crest of climax finally starts to fade. Nolan strokes him through the last of the aftershocks and then releases him, then slides his hand—wet with Alec’s release, and the flare of heat that kindles in Alec’s gut is almost painful so soon after he’s just come—underneath Alec’s shirt and around his back, where he digs his fingers into the muscles at the base of his spine. At the same time he tips his mouth back against Alec’s, licks insistently at the seam of Alec’s lips.

“Now you’re not distracted, so you have to kiss me again,” He says, and leans in some so that he can close his teeth around Alec’s bottom lip.

“Oh, yeah?” Alec somehow manages; he feels simultaneously loose and languid and still completely wired, his shift still firmly settled into his bones, the smell of Nolan’s persistent arousal mixing with his own release combining to keep it buzzing just under his skin, “Are those the rules?”

“Yeah, yep,” Nolan agrees, and takes full advantage when Alec opens his mouth to him.

Alec holds still, somehow sure of what Nolan wants, and immediately Nolan proves him right; he presses his tongue to the tips of Alec’s fangs, sloppier and more insistently than he had earlier. Groaning but forcing himself to hold his head perfectly still to let Nolan do as he wants with Alec’s mouth, Alec drops his still-clawed hands to Nolan’s hips—wrists still firmly bent back to keep his claws away from Nolan’s skin—and pulls them back to his own. He shudders at the rough drag of Nolan’s jeans against his spent cock but doesn’t let up, and Nolan bucks his hips, moans against Alec’s mouth.

He pulls his mouth away from Alec’s then and presses his forehead against Alec’s temple, keeps rolling his hips into Alec’s. Alec desperately wants to touch him, wants to drop to his knees and _taste_ him, but he can’t; he knows with a bone-deep certainty that he’s not going to be able to release the shift, force his claws and fangs to fade, not with the scent, sight, and sound, Nolan’s arousal surrounding like a heady cloud.

“Nolan,” He groans, frustrated, “I want to, I want—but the shift, I _can’t_ —”

But Nolan just kisses the corner of Alec’s mouth, ducks his head to bite at the corner of Alec’s jaw with his blunt, human teeth, “It’s okay. We’ll figure it out.” He stops and pulls back for a second, grins at Alec when Alec looks at him through golden eyes, “We have all the time in the world now to figure it out.”

Alec knows instantly what he means: that Monroe is dead, and Theo is alive, and the McCall pack is safe, and so Alec and Nolan—they can spend some time learning each other, learning how to do this thing. The promise of it takes root in his chest and grows and Alec finds himself smiling helplessly back, leans forward so that he can capture Nolan’s mouth in another deep kiss. Then a thought strikes him and he hesitates, considers it, and then comes to a decision; he encourages Nolan’s head to the side with gentle pressure, ducks his head some when Nolan complies—his pulse jumping in curious anticipation—and slowly, _carefully_ , opens his mouth around the edge of Nolan’s jaw, closes his fangs just enough that he’s sure that Nolan can feel the sensation of them without breaking the skin.

Nolan’s hands clench _hard_ around Alec’s shoulder, his back, and he whimpers, but he holds himself perfectly still. Alec keeps his fangs in place a second longer and then slowly opens his mouth and withdraws, turns to press his forehead against the side of Nolan’s face.

“What can I do?” He asks lowly, desperately, “Tell me what I can do.”

Nolan whines and turns his head to kiss Alec once, hard, and then brings both his hands down to Alec’s half-open jeans to start shoving at them.

“This,” Nolan tells him, and immediately shoves Alec’s jeans down to his mid-thigh when Alec leans against the wall to give him room.

Then he brings his hands to his own jeans, gets them and his briefs shoved down and out of the way so that when he leans back into Alec, his hard cock rides the crease of Alec’s hip. Seeing his vision, Alec moans and moves his thigh to give Nolan a better surface to thrust against, shifts when Nolan’s hands shove at his shirt to push it further up his chest. Nolan does the same to his own shirt and then presses himself back fully to Alec, his hips starting to roll insistently against Alec’s skin.

“Your hands,” Nolan suddenly pants, “Put them—put them above your head.”

Alec feels his brow furrow some but does as he’s bid, raises his arms and then rests the backs of his hands against the wall. Almost immediately Nolan pins them with his own, his fingers slotting in between Alec’s and squeezing tightly. Groaning, Alec keeps his clawed fingers straight, doesn’t bend them to hold Nolan back, but it’s enough; it’s somehow _more_ than enough.

Nolan presses his mouth to the corner of Alec’s but doesn’t try to kiss him, just seems to want another point of connection. Alec turns into it some, a little stunned at how effectively immobilized he feels, Nolan’s hips pinning his own as he continues to ride the crease of Alec’s thigh, his hands holding Alec’s tightly against the wall. It rekindles the temporarily-banked arousal in Alec’s gut and he bites back an entirely-too lupine whine, can’t help a somewhat broken laugh when the sound of it causes Nolan to grin against his mouth.

“I think—think you may have something of a fixation, here,” Alec points out breathlessly.

“Yeah,” Nolan agrees shamelessly, shuddering against Alec as his hips continue to jerk, “For you. For all of you.”

Probably it should sound cheesy, like some kind of cheap pick-up line, but all Nolan sounds is perfectly sincere. Alec bites back a startled, desperate noise and seeks out Nolan’s mouth best he can, pinned as he is, mumbles something incomprehensible in gratitude when Nolan seems to catch on to his desires and presses their mouths together. Alec keeps his teeth clenched to hide the sharp tips of his fangs as best as he can, but lets Nolan lick at them between his lips.

He can tell when Nolan gets close, not just from the way his rhythm starts to stutter but from the way his scent goes sharp and then floods with a heady combination of pleasure and heat. Nolan buries his face in Alec’s next when he comes and Alec thumps his head back against the brick and stares sightlessly up at the ceiling, feeling the hot splash of Nolan’s release on his chest and smelling it close and all around him.

Slumping against him, Nolan groans and releases Alec’s hands, drops his own to wrap languidly around Alec’s neck. Alec leans forward some to give him room, lets his arms drop down and then, after a beat of hesitation, presses them—still shifted—flat against the small of Nolan’s back, his claws resting just lightly against his skin. Nolan makes a small, pleased sound and turns his head against Alec’s shoulder.

They stay like that for a few minutes, just coming down, and then Nolan pulls back—carefully, since Alec’s hands are still clawed against his back—and grins at Alec, “Would you, uh. Would you believe me if I said I didn’t actually plan this?”

_Yes_ , Alec thinks immediately, but out loud he just says, “Not even a little bit.”

Nolan’s grin widens and he smacks Alec’s shoulder with one hand, Alec breaking into an equally wide smirk. He leaves it there afterwards, and his expression sobers some as he watches Alec, his hand clenching in Alec’s shirt.

He pulls his bottom lip between his teeth and then releases it, “I really did just want to say sorry. I was laying on Mason’s couch after he and Corey went up to finally get some sleep, but I just couldn’t relax, so I took the truck keys and came here. I wanted—I needed to tell you that I’m sorry.”

As Nolan speaks—as he confesses, because that’s what this is, what this whole night, minus the unexpected detour, had been; a confession—Alec feels the shift start to settle under his skin and he takes a deep breath, briefly closes his eyes. When he opens them again, he can tell that the gold has faded, that his fingers are once more tipped only with blunt, human nails; that his mouth is full of blunt, human teeth. The danger now gone, Alec brings his hands up and cups Nolan’s face, urges him to lean back into Alec so that Alec can kiss him slow and deep and lingering.

Then he pulls back, and he doesn’t say _you don’t have anything to apologize for_ : he doesn’t tell Nolan not to worry about it. Instead he tightens his grip around Nolan’s face and looks him dead in the eye and says, “I forgive you.”

Nolan’s whole expression crumples and he surges forward into Alec, lets Alec wrap him in a crushingly tight hug and squeezes Alec back just as hard. Alec brings one hand up to the back of Nolan’s head—feels the slight bump from where he’d accidentally shoved Nolan back into the car door during their escape—and just holds onto him.

Eventually Nolan pulls back, and while his cheeks are splotchy with color and his eyes are red, the smile he gives Alec is wide and warm and genuine. Then he glances down and his expression twists with amusement.

“You, uh, really need a shower,” He points out, clearly holding back laughter.

“Yeah, okay, _pot_ ,” Alec retorts, rolling his eyes; Nolan isn’t exactly a paragon of cleanliness at the moment, himself.

But he just starts putting himself back together—to the extent that he can, anyway; he’s going to have send a new set of clothes and an apology back to Yreka—while Nolan does the same. Once more or less in order, Nolan darts forward to press a quick kiss to Alec’s mouth and then takes his hand, starts leading up towards Alec’s very own Impractical Staircase—the name firmly enmeshed from his time living with Theo—and up to the loft’s bathroom.

Alec hesitates briefly when they get there, Nolan ducking inside to start the water—it seems a bit silly to be prudish and Victorian _now_ after their interlude downstairs, but he also doesn’t want to _assume_ —but then Nolan returns and reaches for the hem of Alec’s shirt, starts helping him pull it over his head. They stumble their way out of their clothes bit by bit, stopping every now and then to trade brief touches, quick kisses. But while the heat in Alec’s belly stays burning, it stays sated, banked low.

Instead Alec wraps his arms around Nolan’s waist under the hot spray, leans into it when Nolan drapes his own arms around Alec’s neck. They kiss lazily for a long, slow minute, and then Alec drops his head to Nolan’s shoulder, just stands there and breathes him in, presses back some into the slow sweeps of Nolan’s fingers trailing randomly across his slick skin. By unspoken, mutual decision they don’t bother with more than water. After ten taffy-stretched minutes Nolan reaches back and turns off the spray; Alec does his part by flailing a hand out for the towel rack, snags one and passes it off to Nolan, goes back for a second.

Alec barely manages to dry himself off, exhaustion slamming into him full force. Nolan doesn’t look much better, his movements half-hearted and slow as he swipes the towel over his skin, and Alec can’t help but laugh quietly at the picture he makes.

“C’mon,” Alec murmurs, taking the towel gently and hanging it back up.

He heads over to the closet with the intention of finding something for Nolan—and himself—to sleep in, but when he turns back to ask Nolan what he wants, he’s already buried under the covers, just a tuft of damp hair peeking out. Alec snorts and then hesitates, considering, but finally drops the sweatpants he’d picked up and pads back over to the bed still naked.

Nolan grins at him when he comes into view and raises the covers, a clear invitation. Alec bites his lip but then gets a knee on the bed, slides carefully in beside Nolan. Dropping his head onto the pillow next to Nolan’s, he meets Nolan’s eyes and then reaches out, pulls Nolan gently forward until he can kiss him; the shift doesn’t so much as stir under his skin and Alec feels a hidden knot of tension unravel in his chest.

With one final kiss, Nolan scoots back until he can rest his head on his claimed pillow, “Scott and everyone are planning on coming to Theo’s in a few hours to see how he’s doing, I saw the text on the way over.”

“Okay,” Alec says, and idly wonders where his phone is: he hadn’t bothered to look at it on the run with Malia, and hadn’t gotten the chance before his whole... _whatever_ with Nolan; he bets it’s still in his borrowed pants left somewhere on the bathroom floor, “Well. Knowing Stiles, we’ll definitely hear them coming. It’ll be like an automatic alarm.”

Nolan snorts a laugh but doesn’t disagree. He studies Alec a little longer, and then he reaches out a hand and lays it over the center of Alec’s chest, clenches it lightly, and then closes his eyes. Alec swallows and brings one hand up to cover it, wraps his fingers around it just enough that he can feel the gentle beat of Nolan’s pulse against his fingertips. Then he closes his eyes and stretches his hearing out until he can hear Theo’s heartbeat beating steadily next door, too.

He falls asleep like that, with Nolan’s heartbeat under his fingertips and Theo’s heartbeat in his ears.

**Author's Note:**

> Edited to say: I have a tumblr now! If you liked, consider a [reblog](https://eneiryu.tumblr.com/post/182479709635/that-storm-left-us-shipwrecked-eneiryu-teen).


End file.
